Posted on 02/25/2005 6:29:50 AM PST by Kitten Festival
Have you ever been issued a "guaranteed" reservation by a hotel? You know the drill: they take a credit card number and tell you that you will be charged for the room if you don't show up. But in return, you comfort yourself with the assumption that your access to an actual room at that particular hotel is "guaranteed" even if you show up at 4 AM.
Maybe if you did this, you assumed that it meant that the hotel had already sold the room to you, and that, barring acts of God like a tornado, no matter how late your arrival, the room would be waiting for you. After all, you had paid for it already. That's certainly what I thought the "guarantee" meant.
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How bizarre.
I had this same experience at a Doubletree in New Jersey. I was working at a client site, we had system problems, and I didn't get out of there until 3:30 AM. When I showed up they had given my room away. They sent me to a roach motel down the street, where I got the last room available. Crappy room, wallpaper and carpet didn't match, under the bed was dirty, and it was a smoking room (and I don't smoke).
There is no such thing as a guarantee in that business.
LQ
This is why one should always travel Third World. I go to little Lonely Planet hotels in my travels and never, never do any of them stiff me, fail to pick me up at the airport, not have my room ready, or give it away to someone else. My reservation is made on my word and theirs usually by email, they pick me up, and all goes fine. I don't like these big corporate hotels, they really don't match the quality of service you can get from a nice little third world hotel - and I am not joking - from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Ecuador to Panama to Argentina, they are all very nice and take good care of you. Big corporate hotels are another story.
Yuck! What a loathesome experience! Do these bozos not understand that this is Bad For Business? I don't think they do!
Sometimes big corporate hotels can get sloppy because they can afford to lose more :(
That's exactly it. Little third world hotels can't so they don't. They care about your business and actually want it.
Whoops - that last reply was to Cyborg
Where are all our resident lawyers?
If my last guaranteed hotel reservation had been "cancelled", it would have been a disaster, and real hardship would have accrued: taxi fares, wasted time, yada yada yada...
Is the hotel not liable for any of it?
Agent: I'm sorry, we have no mid-size available at the moment.
Jerry: I don't understand, I made a reservation, do you have my reservation?
Agent: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of cars.
Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
Agent: I know why we have reservations.
Jerry: I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a car. See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to *hold* the reservation and that's really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody
can just take them.
Unfortunately, some hotels do this type of thing to avoid underselling their hotels, much like airlines do. When I ran a chain hotel I never did that and trained my staff not to because I didn't want to deal with the unpleasantness that arises. I also didn't want to upset or disappoint my guests and be forced to try frantically to find them a hotel elsewhere.
The most they usually have to provide is a free room in a "comparable" hotel, a free phone call to whomever you would need to notify of the change in accomodations and a complimentary taxi ride to the hotel, if you need one.
Reactions like yours' are the norm and it's why I didn't do it. Why take a chance that your guest would never patronize your chain again because of not saving a room?
Better luck next time. Sorry that happened to it. It's extremely inconvenient and upsetting.
This is actually a very common practice in the hospitality business (I use the term “hospitality” loosely. They call it “walking” a guest. They pay for your alternate hotel room and your cab fare both to and from the other hotel. Unfortunately, guests generally get walked when they’re showing up a 3:30 in the morning because of delayed flights, late meetings, etc. The last time it happened to me, in Chicago, the hotel I had guaranteed reservations at offered to send me to a flophouse in a part of town I wouldn’t’t want to visit without an armored personnel carrier and a squad of marines fully decked out in all their battle rattle. Fortunately, I had a meeting I was hosting in the hotel which was walking me, and I was able to prevail on the desk clerk to let me roll a folding bed into the meeting room (which had a full bath) so I could get about three hours sleep before getting up to prep for my presentation.
Other occasions when I was walked didn’t work out as well, but I must admit that, in about thirty years of spending 200 or more nights a year in hotels, I can only recall getting walked 5 or 6 times. It doesn’t’t happen that often.
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