Hotel Best Rates Guarantee Promise Is Often A Hoax

Trump SoHo New York hotel

Hotel companies want you to stop shopping around. So why bother going to trivago.com, to agoda.com, to booking.com, to hotels.com, to expedia.com, to orbitz.com, to otel.com, to priceline.com, or to americanexpress.com and the many more available channels? Hotels don’t want you to compare rates, especially if you are a loyal member of their hotel group loyalty program, such as the World of Hyatt, Marriott Rewards, Hilton Honors, Starwood Preferred Guest, and IHG Rewards Club, among others.

As a matter of fact, hotel companies will threaten you NOT to book through what they say are “third party channels,” because if you do, your stay will mean zero points and zero status nights in the hotel loyalty programs. In order to reach an elite status with a hotel or airline, one needs to be loyal. Don’t make the mistake of being loyal to a brand and then booking through your travel agent, your meeting organizer, or one of the many known booking channels. You will never earn any status points that way, because your nights won’t count. So again, we ask, why bother even signing up for a hotel loyalty program?

Here is what hotel companies are advertising on their websites.

• The Lowest Rates Are on Hyatt.com
• Get Our Lowest Price, All The Time, When You Book on Marriott.com
• IHG – Choose from our great brands. Best Price Guarantee. Book direct now!
• We guarantee you always get the lowest price when you reserve a room through an official Hiltonbooking channel
• Best Rate Guarantee* If you find a lower qualified rate** within 24 hours of booking, we’ll match it – and give you a 20% discount or 2,000 Starpoints®

Sounds good, right? But not really. Here is the catch.

The following is a typical response you will get when shopping on a third-party website and find a sometimes significantly better rate.

First, the hotel doesn’t want you to book anything on the third-party website. What the hotel wants you to do is to fill out a lengthy form and ask for the “best rate guarantee.”

After you submit this form, it takes 24 hours for a response. If you’re at an airport trying to book a hotel for the same night, obviously, this “guarantee” will never work.

For a future stay, you most likely will get this response:

HYATT: “I am excited to hear of your desire to stay with us and your interest in our Best Rate Guarantee program. After researching, I was unable to validate your submission based on the Expedia screenshot that represents a “Private Sale Price of 59%, including a $100 Resort credit” which is a membership-only price package thus making it an invalid for the Hyatt Best Rate Guarantee. As indicated, the guest went to expedia.com and signed into the site, thus opening up the member pricing options.”

This means if you use a booking website, you are always asked to establish a sign-in. There is no cost to do so and no membership – it’s simply a username and a password. BUT, once you do this, then hotel companies consider you to be a “member” of that travel booking club, and there goes the option to use the hotel’s best rate guarantee.

In many cases, once you go back to the third-party website a day after the hotel has “investigated” and turned your claim down, you won’t be able to get that special deal anymore, because it has already been sold out.

Sometimes it pays, however, to be more firm instead of accepting this unfriendly hotel response. In the case of a Starwood Hotels and Resorts reservation, a claim to bring a nightly rate down from $280 to $89.44 plus receive a 20% additional bonus was honored, only after being threatened with a bad review on trip advisor, a filing with small claims court, and a letter to the editor.

This was the initial response by STARWOOD:

Thank you for your interest in the Starwood’s Hotels & Resorts Best Rate Guarantee program. It is always a pleasure hearing from our Gold members. I hope my email finds you well.

Please be advised that as per my understanding, I have processed the claim for a Premium room as originally booked. However, I request you to please mention the room type on which you want to get your claim processed in the New Starwood Room Type section in the future.

I have reviewed the rates for The Westin Las Vegas Hotel & Spa for the dates of your claim on our website and found a rate of $257.04 USD plus taxes and fees per night which is lower than the rate of $280.78 USD plus taxes and fees per night found on hotels.com. Since the rate is lower on our website, I am not able to approve your claim. To find the complete details of the Best Rate Guarantee program, please refer to our published terms and conditions.

So what happened here? Starwood looked at a higher room category on otel.com, the competing site. The claim was clearly for the lowest category, since the category names did not match on otel.com and westin.com, but this seems to be just another way to deny claims.

Here is the second response to this claim after it was first denied:

Thank you for your email regarding your Best Rate Guarantee claim for The Westin Las Vegas Hotel, Casino & Spa. I appreciate the opportunity to address your email.

After reviewing the claim, I show a room type was not listed on the competing website or our hotel website, and our associate processed the claim for the room type listed on the reservation.

Please know I have processed the claim once again; only this time I have processed it for the standard room at the hotel. Your claim has been processed for the traditional room.

I am pleased to advise your claim is approved. I was unable to locate availability for a Traditional room on our website, though I was able to locate availability on otel.com, which allows me to offer you the approved rate of 89.44 USD, plus tax and amenity fee, per night, and an additional 20% off the rate as requested.

My advice: Cancel the booking altogether and select an independent hotel that doesn’t play games with loyal customers. Travel agencies and tour operators should avoid brand hotels to not upset clients with a loyalty program or put pressure on those hotel companies to treat travel agents, tour operators, and meeting planners fairly.

A Five-Finger Guide To Stealing From Hotels

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Have you ever (ahem) “accidentally” taken anything from a hotel? Bet you never tried to fit an entire china set under your coat.

Grabbing a ballpoint from my desk drawer the other day, I noticed something: Every pen was a souvenir of my travels, sporting the logos of hotels from Los Angeles (The Montage—golden ink, hefty barrel) to Cape Town (Kensington Place—fat nib, comfy grip). Then a pang of conscience—after all, I’d essentially stolen every one of them. Sometimes it was forgetfully, stashed in a jacket pocket; often, though, I’d palmed those pens deliberately, a free reminder of my trip. When I started asking friends who work at hotels about this idea—'liberating' items as souvenirs—I was reassured: Compared to most guests, I’m a boy scout.

It isn’t eco-awareness that’s driving hotels to swap miniatures for massive toiletry bottles bolted to the bathroom wall, one pal told me. It’s to prevent excessive pilfering. "Check the room attendant’s trolley next time you pass it in the hotel corridor," he added. "It’ll be locked—too many people walking past and filling their purses with bottles of shampoo." It’s the same reason the remote control panel is often screwed down, now: Even at five-star properties, it might now be screwed shut to prevent its batteries being 'repurposed.'"

Eagle-eyed housekeepers can be relied on to spot sticky-fingered guests. Another friend, a veteran staffer at a luxury hotel in London, recalled the Plunder in a Teacup. That was when a room attendant saw some china peeking out from a guest’s bag; investigating, she found an entire service of the hotel’s custom china carefully wrapped and stashed inside. When challenged, the couple didn’t blink—unabashed, they were slightly bewildered, unwilling even, to return the stolen items. No wonder the plate or vase used for VIP amenities is so intentionally bland and nondescript.

A room attendant saw some china peeking out from a guest’s bag; investigating, she found an entire service of the hotel’s custom china carefully wrapped and stashed inside.

Some thefts, though, are truly egregious, like the pair who pilfered the two concrete lucky Fu Dogs that greet guests at the entrance of one Mandarin Oriental hotel. Apparently, they snuck down in the middle of the night and silently hauled those hundred-pound-plus sculptures into extra-large rollaboards. I almost want to applaud their brazen preparedness. As for my pens, I was apparently off the hook: A marketing manager explained that branded biros are treated as an overhead, since guests are expected to take them, turning the pens into free advertising. It’s much the same when it comes to umbrellas at luxury hotels, he continued. They’re tacitly expected to remain unreturned (notice how they rarely have a price tag on them, compared with the robes dangling nearby).

Hotels have responded to such sticky-fingeredness in different ways. A Starwood insider admitted the creation of its W store, an online portal to buy items that will turn your bedroom into your favorite hotel room, was intended to turn steals into sales. (See how the Keep Your Wig On pillow from the W Londonwas a top non-seller, and is now available to buy in that hotel’s onsite boutique.)

Other properties have turned to forgiveness, launching no-questions-asked amnesty periods when errant objets can be returned without shame or charge. The Marriott Mayflower in Washington, D.C. launched one in an attempt to recover items embossed with its signature sailing emblem, while the Waldorf-Astoria’s program in New York focused on antiques that had gone AWOL between 1931 and 1960. In the first few months of this program, it received more than 200 items, many of them solid silver; the most common item was the silver demitasse spoon from the hotel’s supper club in the 1930s, when it was the hottest nightspot in Manhattan. It prompted confessions, crises of conscience, and much criticism of genteel grandmothers.

But as those amnesties suggest, stealing from your suite isn’t new. In fact, it’s long been common in hotels—in part, perhaps, because of its strange impact on even the most strait-laced psyche. Though we’re never more identifiable and under surveillance than when we check into a hotel—we hand over ID, and there are discreet CC TV cameras covering every inch of the property—overnighting somehow liberates us from social norms and niceties. We think we can misbehave without consequence. It’s such a large part of hotels’ allure, I doubt Hyatt and co. would ever risk focusing too much on reducing losses. I won’t worry next time I palm a pen though.

Written by Mark Ellwood, www.cntraveler.com

Travelore Tips: How To Get the Best Five-Star Hotel Deal

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What makes for a good deal at a pricey property? I'm not talking about the lowest price necessarily. I'm talking about the best value, room, and benefits for your dollar.

Those with elite frequent-guest status with a particular hotel company are often better off booking through the hotel's website rather than through an online travel agency (e.g., Orbitz). But what if you're not elite? And what if you don't have a rewards card, like the American Express Platinum Card, which confers pseudo-elite status at certain top hotels and resorts (for $450/year)? What's the best way to score the perks of elite status—from free upgrades to free breakfasts?

When you're headed to a five-star resort for vacation, the answer is: through the right human-being travel agent. The value of top-tier traditional travel agents always seems to be left out of the online conversation (although it's discussed at plenty of cocktail parties). The right travel agent can get you a free upgrade (depending on seasonal availability), free breakfasts and possibly other meals too, maybe a resort credit, maybe a free transfer or two, early check-in/late check-out, and other benefits. Go to any five-star resort, and the people with the free upgrades and breakfasts and credits are the people who booked through a travel agent who (1) sits on the hotel company's travel agent advisory board, (2) works for an agency whose head sits on the advisory board, or (3) belongs to a consortium (e.g., Virtuoso) that has negotiated these benefits with the specific hotel. Many of Conde Nast Traveler's well-connected travel specialists fall into one or more of these categories, of course.

Contributed by Wendy Perrin