“WHEN C. Leonard Gordon, a venture capitalist, travels with his wife, Margot, an art dealer, he never goes straight to the assigned hotel room with her. “Instead, I sit with the luggage in the lobby and read until she’s decided on a room,” he said. “She usually rejects the first one or two they show her. So I don’t go up with her after we check in, unless I feel like I need exercise.”
The fussy Mrs. Gordon is not alone. At Shutters on the Beach, in Santa Monica, Calif., about five customers a day ask for their rooms to be changed, said Klaus Mennekes, the hotel’s managing director. At the 3,500-room Atlantis Hotel in Nassau, room-change requests can number as many as 200 a day, said George Markantonis, the hotel’s president and managing director. And the staff at the 450-room Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain, gets about 30 room-change requests daily, Ricard Casimiro, the front-of-the-house manager, said.
Sometimes these requests are made in a friendly manner, with customers like Mrs. Gordon just trying to ensure that they get the best room available for the money. “Some of the older European hotels often have a number of different rooms at the same price, and some are awful and some are nice,” she said. On a return visit to a London hotel, “they gave us a room that was practically in the basement. I was horrified,” she recalled. “They found us another room for the same price that was lovely.”
But other guests are clearly just out to manipulate the system, hotel managers say, often setting the stage for a confrontation as they head up to the room, perhaps complaining about the height of the hallway ceiling or the fact that they believe they are being led to a less desirable wing of the hotel.
Take, for example, the regular guest at the Loews Regency on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who always books its lower-priced “superior” room. “He checks into the first room, and immediately finds something wrong,” said Stuart Schwartz, the hotel’s managing director. “He complains about smells, stains or scuff marks. We show him another room. It goes on four or five times. The assistant manager finally gets exasperated, reads between the lines and gives him his unstated choice: a grand luxury room at the lower price.”
Like the theater, where one can pay $120 for a fifth-row center orchestra seat or a seat in the 24th row, a traveler can pay the same amount for a room with a better view or in better condition than another at the same price.
The comparisons are often worst at hotels that are being renovated, travel experts say. “Sometimes they do it floor by floor, so a client might pay $400 for a room that has not been renovated when there is another that has been remodeled for the same price, and they would never know,” said Rina Anoussi, a travel agent at the Travel Business/Tzell in New York.
Unlike Web sites like seatguru.com, which gives detailed information on the configurations of seats on various airplanes, there are no well-established Web sources providing similar breakdowns on hotel rooms, though a three-month-old site, Tripkick.com, now offers room-by-room guides for hotels in about 15 cities. So guests are largely on their own when trying to decide if the hotel has stuck them with a less desirable room.
How to increase your odds of getting a better one? Tipping doesn’t hurt.
Sandy R. Bass, publisher of a newsletter for New York City’s private school parents, says she goes to the check-in desk with “$20 to $40 in my hand.” Ms. Bass said. “It embarrasses my family, so I just tell them to stay back. They disappear into the woodwork.”
The desk clerks have a lot of discretionary power, Ms. Bass said. “They can put you in a corner room that is the same price and much bigger than other rooms or a room that overlooks the city or the lake instead of the parking lot,” she said. “We generally get a good room and, of course, my family, which hid out while I was negotiating, does a fast about-face and is thrilled.”
When Ava Seave was growing up, the family vacation took on a certain ritualistic aspect whenever it came time to check into a hotel. Her father, now an 86-year-old retiree, would immediately tell the front-desk clerk: “Now, listen, don’t give me the room you were going to give me. Give me the room you were going to give me after the one I came downstairs and complained about. ”
It almost always worked, she said. ” (via www.nytimes.com) by GERALDINE FABRIKANT
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“Using the fast pass system is a great way to minimize your time in lines once you get a system. Get a pass for the most new or popular attraction you want to see as early as possible and then work from there. When you are allowed another fast pass, make sure you know which one you are getting next and it is fairly easy to see and do the less “popular at the moment” things and shops in between. We have had very positive experiences and I don’t feel like we stand in line all day. I know this sounds dorky, but sometimes I even have a book or something with me if the line is long and my family has been together all day