Travel website Room 77, to this point a tool largely used by travelers to ensure hotel rooms meet their criteria upon check-in, has added booking capabilities for its global database of about 750,000 hotel rooms.
A few travel industry professionals, including one buyer, recently have questioned why we publish hotel executives’ predictions on negotiated rate increases, which tend to be overly aggressive.
To be sure, what a hotel CEO projects when reporting second-quarter earnings is rarely what we see when negotiations wrap up at the end of the year. They can, however, provide a fairly accurate idea of what buyers should expect when they first sit down at the table.
An unwanted copy of
USA Today has prompted a $100,000 lawsuit against Hilton Worldwide, but in terms of targeting what some see as runaway fees in travel bills, it's a bit of a misfire.
A Sacramento man, Rodney Harmon, recently filed a class action lawsuit against the hotel giant in response to the newspaper delivery policy at Hilton Garden Inn. The hotel does not charge 75 cents for guests’ daily
USA Today per se. It's not something that will appear on a folio at the end of the stay. Guests who ask the front desk to opt out of the delivery, however, receive a 75-cent credit. Harmon's lawsuit contends that the policy is not spelled out clearly enough.
The lawsuit aside, 75 cents per night might seem a pittance but certainly could be significant if spread across a large hotel program. So, is it something worth negotiating? Probably not.
Talk to anybody who has tried to clean up corporate hotel data, and you’ll know they hate doing it. It’s a pain in the butt to take a company’s hotel booking data from its TMC, and merge it with the company’s paid hotel data from its corporate card.
The first and arguably hardest step is to normalize the hotel identities. Somehow, you have to recognize that a credit card transaction at the “Marriott Courtyard in Salt Lake” should be tied to the reservation made at the “Courtyard by Marriott in Saltlake City”.
One of my clients recently gave me the nickname "The Metric Man" because of my warped affinity toward developing and finding viable and useable travel metrics (I have little social life). The marketing side of me thought it was catchy and I probably should brand and own it. However, the egotistical side of me was thinking it was dangerously close to "The Muffin Man" and I'd lose any 'street cred' I've worked hard to obtain. Maybe I'll let the readers decide if I should wear it as a virtual pocket protector of honor.
