For typical hotels in the US, if I check in for a multi-day stay but go away for few days in the middle of the stay, do they care? Should I call and let them know, or would they think “uh, why are you telling us this?” This is assuming I leave my stuff in the room, and return to the hotel before the end of the reservation period to check out.
Don’t need answer fast, just wondered last time I considered doing it.
As long as you paid for it, they dont care.
I’d be surprised if they even noticed.
I’ve done that when I’m in a hotel for a long time and want to fly home for the weekend, for example. No one cares. I put the “Do Not Disturb” sign out, so, as Joey P says, they probably didn’t even know. (or care)
Since the question has been answered, I’m going to hijack this thread with the opposite question. In a past life, I had been staying in a hotel Monday-Friday for the better part of four months for work. One week, I could not get Thurs & Fri because some event was happening in a nearby town. I just didn’t check out Thurs morning. When I returned that evening, my key card didn’t work and I had to go to the front desk. Besides the dirty looks, I was given a lecture and told “If you do that again, we’re going to throw all your stuff in the parking lot.” I always wondered if they could actually do that?
Well, by not clearing out of the room on Thursday morning, you’ve essentially engaged in theft of services – your contract for use of the room expired at check-out time on Thursday morning, and not vacating the room by that time put you in violation of the contract.
“Throw your stuff in the parking lot” may be an exaggeration to get your attention, but the principle still holds, I think – they may well have the right to dispose of your property as they see fit if it’s been left in the room after your legal stay ended.
At Walt Disney World in Florida, there are certain perks involved with renting a hotel room on property, such as earlier access to Fastpass reservations - you could reserve rides & get table reservations 60 days ahead of time instead of the 30 that were available to the unwashed masses who were willing to stay outside Disney property. At anything but the slowest times of year, all the passes to the popular rides, meet & greets, and restaurants were gone pretty much right on the 60 day mark. So people would rent a “throwaway room” for one night to take advantage of those perks. You had to actually pay for the room ahead of time to get access to the perks, and if you cancelled your reservation it cancelled your fastpasses, so there was nothing particularly dishonest about what you were doing. People generally never checked into the room, but they were still billed for it.
But it wound up blowing up on a Disney oriented message board, and a lot of Disney fans got Very Angry that people were paying for a room but not actually using it, because it prevented someone else from using the room or something like that. So Disney apparently started cracking down on it, and if you didn’t actually check into your room and make it appear lived in, they’d cancel all your fastpasses as well. Even though they still took your money.
I can’t make sense of your actions. They didn’t have any room available for Thursday or Friday nights, what did you think was going to happen? They were just going to say “Oh, I guess he’s still here, so we won’t be able to honor someone else’s reservation?” Or magic? Please share your thinking process.
(Note: I realize this thread is still in GQ, so if there is an objection to this line of inquiry, I only submit that it is a response to a hijack, and that it is a genuine request for a factual answer.)
This isn’t correct where I am (Alberta). I doubt our laws are unique, so something similar probably exists elsewhere in north America as well. Here, if you don’t pay your bill and leave your stuff in their room they can confiscate your belongings but they need to keep it on the premises and safeguard it for 30 days, during which I would presume you both try to get things straightened out. If you haven’t paid up by then then they have the right to auction it off, or presumably throw it in the parking lot if they choose.
I don’t know if anything would be different if you actually paid up to that morning but then left your stuff in the room regardless.
But people leave stuff in their rooms all the time, and the hotel doesn’t get to just take everything left behind and toss it or sell it for their own personal gain. I would think a moody hotel desk clerk who tossed $10,000 worth of business equipment into the dumpster/sold it at the pawnshop from a room where a guy didn’t show up to pay the bill that morning (because he had an accident the previous evening) would be looking for a new job that afternoon and might get their hotel in trouble for themselves violating the law.
Varies from state to state and even county or municipality but what you are describing is a “holdover guest”.
So let’s take California for instance
They may lock you out and take possession of your property but are required to give it back on request according to this
However, with the limit that they are protected by this
Which means they aren’t responsible for over $1000 no matter what.
If they have a safe and post signs they aren’t responsible for over $500 in small valuables that weren’t placed in it by guests.
Unless they actually cause the damage or loss.
Which would be on you to prove.
They took possession but it got stolen…you’re outta luck.
So I guess they could put it in the parking lot, saying they took possession if it, but probably would open themselves up to up to a $1000 liability.
Although they reference that before this, common law was that they could take your stuff and use it to pay your debt and any damages ( labor) they incurred because of you.
We travel a lot and use hotels as a base for whatever area we’re in. We can go days without returning depending on what we’re doing. Sometimes that just happens.
As long as the room was paid for we’ve never had an issue with it, nobody has ever questioned it.
However, I’ve read some reviews on Trip Advisor where people have had rooms prepaid for days and didn’t come back one of the nights and the establishment cleared their room, stored their belongings, and re-rented the room! :eek:
I would lose my cool if that happened to me! :mad:
I’m not going to ask what brought this on . . . actually using the room . . . The idea an American, other than a close friend, boss or spouse, would care what you’re doing enough to keep track is a quaint notion. (It almost revived my delusion that Americans can show compassion!)
They honestly don’t care what you don’t do in the hotel. As long as you’re out by check out time, they’re happy. . . letting the cleaning people in at the appropriate times does lend itself well to maintaining good will. They DO, however, care a great deal about what you DO in their hotel rooms. Thank the actual rock and roll stars of a bygone era for this - like tossing televisions out windows, or shooting them with large caliber handguns. Or having strange interactions with fish you’ve caught dropping a fishing line out your window (Mudshark!)
You might consider the expense of renting a room you’re not using, however. It seems like a gargantuan waste of capital. (Correct me if I’m wrong, or even if I’m not!)
Some hotels will perform a “welfare check” if you leave the “Do Not Disturb” sign out for too many days. (I put the sign out because I usually prefer not to receive hospitality services every day.)
This will start with a simple knock on the door to confirm that you don’t need any towels or soap.
If you’ve been repeatedly out of the room when they’ve knocked, they may enter the room to check on you, and leave a note informing you of same.
I’ve done it - with a room we didn’t pay for. My husband gambles enough that we get free hotel rooms, so once we had a free room for a week in New Orleans and spent a night or two in Baton Rouge. Why- because it was easier than packing up and moving everything two extra times.
But I’m wondering about the Disney thing, where people paid for the room but never checked in. Was it locals who were doing this? Because what I don’t get is why you would pay for a Disney hotel that you weren’t going to use at all and pay for another hotel near Disney.
No, we did it and we were traveling from Boston. 1 night in a budget Disney room got you a week’s worth of perks, and those perks were valuable enough to me (and many other people) that I would have paid that much as a flat fee. But there’s no way my family of 5 could actually stay in that sized room for even a night, much less a week. So we got a hotel (actually a rental house) off property and had a much more comfortable living situation, for way less than a comparable hotel room on Disney property would have cost. Even accounting for the cost of a rental car.
Exactly - which is why the answer to the OP is that it’s not required, but it is the sensible and courteous thing to do to let the hotel know if you will be absent when they expect you to be there.
I didn’t realize that they’d give you the whole week’s worth of perks for booking one night. Seems like it would be worth it to not only book the room, but check in and make it look like you used it, so I doubt their cracking down really changed anything.
I’ve done it before for 24 hr events. I could have saved some money by checking out for the one night in the middle that I wasn’t there but then I would have needed to pack up my stuff, take it down to the desk for them to hold, & when I got back, stand in line to check in & then wait for them to give me my stuff again, all when I’m exhausted & just want a shower & to crawl into bed. The extra cost was worth the (lack of) hassle & speed to horizontal.
I’ve done this several times. I’m on vacation, staying at a hotel. Maybe I go out in the evening and end up spending the night at a location other than my own hotel room. I never thought anyone with the hotel would notice or care, and to my knowledge, they didn’t. It’s one of the perks of adulthood.
I don’t know how they would know anyway, without some serious surveillance. People can keep odd hours. Some people may leave for the day at 4:30 AM. Some people may not get home until then. As long as your stuff is in the room I don’t know why it matters.
However, the hotel is going to want access to your room every couple of days. They want to make sure you’re not trashing the place. If you leave your DND sign out 24/7 for more than a couple of days, you may get a message from the front desk. But they don’t care if you’re sleeping there.
I have, on several occasions, gotten messages from the front desk of the hotel regarding my apparent habit of leaving “valuables” in the room when I’m away. Some times the items were moved to the hotel safe, at other times they just flat out refused to service the room until my “valuables” were secured.
Please note I was not leaving out jewelry or expensive electronics. The “valuables” are always my loose change and a few crumpled dollar bills that I fish out of packet and leave on the dresser. Leaving this stuff out was never a problem in the US, but I consistently forget not to do that when traveling outside the US, and it always gets me in trouble.