Mastercard is running a promotion where you get the third night free after you purchase the first two nights at a Le Meridien hotel, details are available at the Mastercard website. Book your reservation at the Le Meridien website or call up 1-800-543-4300 and request promo code MASTERCARD.
Expires Dec. 31st, 2005.
Faster Free Nights at Hyatt!
Earn a free night at Hyatt worldwide after every two eligible stays when you pay with your MasterCard® card from September 1 through November 30, 2005. Redeem your Faster Free Nights Award(s) between September 15, 2005 and January 31, 2006.
I’ve never heard of such a generous rewards program before. If you travel on Hyatt and aren’t yet a member, sign up. If you are already a Hyatt Gold Passport member, you’ll have to register to get in on this offer.
Murray of Capital Ideas recently cashed out some of his Marriott Reward Points and sold the merchandise on Ebay. With some numbers he calculated that each point was worth approximately $0.004 (four-tenths of a penny) and when each dollar spent accrued 13 points, he was getting about 5% cash back. It’s always good to figure out how much an esoteric “point” is worth but remember that your conversion rates (points to merchandise to ebay sale) may vary!
CNNMoney reports that InterContinental Hotels Group is going to kick off a new frequent guest rewards program that will give members the ability to spend their points on any hotel that accepts American Express cards. A guest accrues points in the Priority Club and, as part of the new “Any Hotel, Anywhere” program, they can redeem it for cards they can use anywhere. They’re also running a promotion where they’re going to distribute luggage tags and one out of six will have a code that gives them free stays at the hotels (you enter the code online).
InterContinental Hotels Group operates InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Crowne Plaza Hotels & Reports, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, and Candlewood Suites.
It’s like they saw the Geico TinyHouse commercial and thought it would make a great business model for a hotel room - they may be right. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who brought you the no-frills airline EasyJet, now has EasyHotel - a no frills, ridiculously cheap, tiny hotelier. Featured on CNN’s Business Traveler site, the rooms range in size from 60 to 80 square feet at a maximum cost of $90 a night. However, EasyHotel might not be the cheapest option depending on where you’re going.
Gerri Willis writes a daily column of five tips and today they feature things you can do in the event of bad service or a bad product, as it relates to travel. Some of these are common sense, you may already do these things, others are on that border of where you aren’t sure if it’s customary to ask or if the company will laugh at you. This covers airlines, cruises, hotels, tours, and online travel agencies (Expedia, Travelocity, etc).
CNN definitely made this sound a lot worse than it was: Hotels said to change sheets less often makes you think you’re going to have to sleep in the dried sweat of half a dozen previous guests… what it really means is that on extended stays, hotels aren’t going to change your sheets everyday. I would prefer they didn’t change it everyday, think of all the detergent washed down the drain, all the water wasted, and all the fabrics being worn from constant washes. Shareholders and Mother Earth smile at these decisions.
“It’s a growing industry trend,” Steve Samson, an executive with Marriott International (Research), the world’s largest hotel chain, told the paper. Marriott’s more upscale, full-service hotels began switching to every three days earlier this year, the paper reports.
Privately-held Global Hyatt Corp. went from changing each guest’s sheets daily to every four days last year, according to the paper.
Some leading chains, including Holiday Inn, do not have uniform policies on sheet changes across the chain, according to a survey of companies by the paper. Some lodging companies, including Sheraton, Westin and St. Regis, all owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide (Research), still make daily sheet changes.
Jason Womack of In The Life had a very eye-opening post today referencing an article from USA Today about how hotels, either purposefully or by accident, overcharge patrons. Both articles reference a review by Corporate Lodging Consultants, a company that negotiates hotel rates for various companies; of one of their client’s charges within the last twelve months. The results? 11.6% of the bills were incorrectly charged with an average overpayment of $11.35 a night. Extend that to 1.4M rooms a night, the US average, and that means approximately $500M in overcharges.
Quite possibly one of the only reasons to pick one hotel over another is because of their beds… a bad night’s rest is reason enough never to return to a hotel chain regardless of price. So wouldn’t it be useful if someone listed all the types of beds in each of the major US hotel chains? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that the Radisson is planning on replacing over 90,000 of their beds with the new Select Comfort Sleep-Number mattresses?
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Introducing our new Hilton HHonors My Way e-mail – your own personal monthly e-mail designed to bring you information about your HHonors account, special offers, promotions and events that are relevant to your unique needs and interests. Welcome to news and information your way.
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Valid until December 31st, 2005.