No Room at the Inn

The memos had been going out for days. Do not walk this individual. His name was flagged, highlighted, circulated across departments, and repeated in every stand-up meeting we had. The Dodgers were in house, and the one rule with a team is that the team stays together, in the same building, every one of them. Then one of the key players didn't travel in with everybody else, arrived on his own later that night, and the hotel was full.

He got walked. To a very nice hotel, I want to be clear. Extremely high-end, the kind of place you would be delighted to be sent on any other evening of your life. It did not matter even slightly, because the point was never the thread count. The point was that he was supposed to be with his team, and he was in a different building, and we had put him there.

For the first stretch of my career, this almost never happened, because hotel rates were essentially decided once and then left alone for years like a houseplant nobody waters. Then the industry noticed that rates could move, and invented a position to move them. A revenue manager watches your competitive set, knows what every comparable hotel in the city is charging on any given Tuesday, and reads the city calendar for anything that creates compression. A concert. A convention. Anything that fills the whole town at once and lets everybody charge whatever they want.

Compression is where confirmations go to die. Say a 250 room hotel sold 100 rooms two years ago to a group at a reasonable rate, in a contract, which is exactly why groups contract. Then a stadium show lands on that same weekend and suddenly every room in the city is worth six hundred dollars. The group keeps its rate because the group has paper. Everyone else pays the new number, and the hotel starts taking reservations at the new number with real enthusiasm.

At some point the arithmetic gets ahead of the inventory, and the hotel is oversold. Then somebody sits down with the arrivals list and decides who is least expensive to disappoint. It is not a mystery who that is. It is the third party bookings, the Expedia and Orbitz and Hotels.com reservations, and the discounted rates, and the hotel employee who got the friends and family rate. Someone looks at a seventy-five dollar reservation sitting next to a six hundred dollar opportunity and does the only thing the spreadsheet permits.

That situation has a name in the business. It's called a walk, and there are rules about it that most hotels actually follow. If they cannot house you, they owe you a comparable hotel as close by as they can manage, paid for by them, with transportation to get you there. If you traveled in for a specific thing, they should get you to that too. You should not pay for the room they failed to give you, and you should not pay for the room they send you to. They still come out ahead, because they sold your night for considerably more than you were paying. That is the whole reason you're standing in the lobby.

Most front desks will offer all of this before you have to ask. If they don't, ask, because you are entitled to it. The one version where you are out of luck is the version where they tell you your reservation was canceled. You know you didn't cancel it. They probably know you didn't cancel it. But the screen says canceled at 4:30 on a Thursday, and there is nowhere to go from there.

The group room block exists to keep all of this from touching you. Ten rooms is generally the minimum to get a contract, and the trade is attrition. Commit to fifty rooms at eighty percent attrition and your conference sells ten, and you are still paying for forty. People sign that and then look at me as though I personally wrote it on the back of a napkin. I didn't write it. I just read it out loud.

Weddings bring their own category of hope. Brides ask for all their guests on one floor so everyone can wander room to room in robes, and I explain that we will try, and that check in and check out patterns are not something anyone can promise. They hear try. They remember promise.

The worst one I had was a wedding spending a genuinely absurd amount of money, enough that the hotel comped them the presidential suite instead of the usual bridal suite. They had toured it. They had pictured it. Then a VIP arrived before them and was put in it, and once someone is checked in with a card on file, you cannot ask them to leave. I have never found a way to make a lesser suite sound like good news on a wedding night. They came back afterward and said we had ruined the wedding, and asked for a great deal of money back.

Check your reservation two weeks out. Check it again the day before. It will not save you, but at least you'll find out sitting down.