I recall after the Las Vegas shooter incident there was talk that the LV hotels were going to change procedures to check up on rooms where the person seemed to not want any people coming in the room. Don’t know what they actually did in that regard.
Agree. Seems like going over there to check-in and placing some “stunt luggage” in the room would be in order.
Yes, and for a while on that other board that’s exactly what posters were suggesting. It’s a bit of a hassle of course - someone’s got to leave the park drive to the hotel, check in, go rustle up the beds and throw a few wet towels on the floor, etc. Much easier just to eat the no-show charge. FWIW, I didn’t check in and didn’t have any problems.
For all I know, they’ve fixed the system since then so you can’t get a full week (or maybe 10 days?) worth of early reservations with only a single night’s stay. My kids have aged out of Disney vacations, so I don’t keep up with it anymore.
I travel a fair bit for work and did ~50 nights last year. The company is paying for my travel so if I meet up with a friend I usually grab my gear and stay with them the hotel has never had a problem when I come back the next day with my stuff. Occasionally, I’ll do this the night before I check out and just never come back to the hotel. It’s still never been a problem.
It was a dick move, I’ll grant you that. The way I rationalized it was… It would be easier for the people who hadn’t yet unpacked their car to go to another hotel than for me to move. And I figured I had spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 at that hotel in the previous four months, so any inconvenience to them was taken care of.
There’s the old joke:
“Are you telling me that if the Queen of England showed up you would not have a room for her?”
“We certainly would!”
“Well, she’s not coming so I’ll take her room…”
FWIW, one non-dick-move way to handle it would have been to talk to the hotel’s manager at the beginning of the week:
“Hey, I’m here staying with you all week, every week, and I wasn’t able to get a room here for Thursday and Friday – you’re booked solid already. What can you do to help me?”
The only time we’ve done this is when we had a ten-day reservation at a small property in London. We decided at the last minute to take the Eurotrain Chunnel to Paris for two nights, and wanted to take only a few changes of clothes instead of all of our belongings. We informed the front desk and they were cool with it. I do think that in Europe they keep track of their guest’s comings and goings more closely, and that may have thought that we had abandoned our (paid-for) room.
The hotel doesn’t care, the room is booked and making money. Housekeeping does care, they are more than happy to touch up rather than have a full room turn. But be assured, someone is assigned to your room and keeping the hotel aware of it’s status.
And don’t worry, those DND signs do not deter room attendants/management/security from checking on rooms. Usually just a peek in to make sure something does not need to be addressed.
Dougrb, you should complained when told about the Thu/Fri bookings blackout. They probably would gladly let you pay whatever the rate was for that group, you could have pushed for somewhere in between whatever rate you had been getting and the group rate or maybe somebody realized you and/or your company (more than one room?) were good customers and held your rate.
I didn’t think it would be a problem. But it seemed like an unusual thing to do, and I know better than to think that just because I don’t think something is a problem, it isn’t.
If I’m on a 2-week business trip and decide to go somewhere else for the weekend, I’m not going to the trouble of packing all my stuff, checking out Saturday morning and carrying all my stuff with me just to save my employer some money.
Anyway thanks everyone for the responses.
I hate to admit it… but my method didn’t require nearly as much work.
I had a two-month stay in Anaheim once at a Residence Inn, and had a week-long break but just kept my room.
I’m surprised that your company couldn’t have gotten you that room with as long as you were staying there.
Back when I did new product launches as our plants, I was pretty much a permanent resident at any hotel I stayed at. There’s no way I would check out for a weekend home or a week’s vacation. The hotel didn’t care, although to be honest, I’m usually on a first name basis with everyone after the first few weeks.
Pulling a week or two of nights was always kind of awkward, though, because housekeeping doesn’t really work odd shifts.
Huh. My one experience with that kind of situation was exactly the opposite.
I was living in NYC. Relatives came to visit. The family of four didn’t want to stay in my studio apartment (understandably), so I made a reservation for them in a hotel down the street — one room w/two double beds.
They arrive, they come to my apartment, I walk with them to the hotel. The desk clerk tells them there is no room; they were going to be given the room of someone who was checking out that day, but that person changed his/her mind and decided to stay. No other rooms were available, either, so they were out of luck.
Yeah, I would have talked to the hotel. There’s always a couple rooms held back. Assuming this was in the USA, put yourself in the position of a jet lagged person who doesn’t speak the language. Perhaps they had taken an expensive Uber to get to the hotel. Now, take all the time they’ve spent researching the hotel and the immediate areas. Yeah, it was a dick move.
I worked for five years in the hotel business, and agree with most of the answers you have been given - as long as the room is paid for and your items are in there, then the hotel generally does not care that you don’t stay in the room every night. However, it would be courteous of you, and in your best interest, to notify the front desk that you expect to be out of the hotel x number of nights, but you want to retain the room. The housekeeping staff will know that they don’t have to clean the room beyond the first day of your absence, and the staff will know that you intend to return. Believe it or not, there are cases of people abandoning a room AND all their luggage. Those are usually people who are on the run from the law and have to boogie when they are away from the hotel, or they are arrested and the staff has no way of knowing. In Dallas, we once had a couple abandon all their luggage and a big, sweet dog. The dog went to a local shelter, and we stored the luggage for a year; the guests never returned.
I worked for five years in the hotel business, and agree with most of the answers you have been given - as long as the room is paid for and your items are in there, then the hotel generally does not care that you don’t stay in the room every night. However, it would be courteous of you, and in your best interest, to notify the front desk that you expect to be out of the hotel x number of nights, but you want to retain the room. The housekeeping staff will know that they don’t have to clean the room beyond the first day of your absence, and the staff will know that you intend to return. Believe it or not, there are cases of people abandoning a room AND all their luggage. Those are usually people who are on the run from the law and have to boogie when they are away from the hotel, or they are arrested and the staff has no way of knowing. In Dallas, we once had a couple abandon all their luggage and a big, sweet dog. The dog went to a local shelter, and we stored the luggage for a year; the guests never returned.
Back when I did international cponsuktancy work and spend something like 300 nights away, I always told them when I would be gone overnight. They had zero problems, and were thankful for the courtesey.
There was a Dilbert strip where he was trying to get a room at the desk of a fully-occupied motel.
In the last frame, he asked the clerk, “Hey, if the Pope were coming here…”
And in the lower right corner of the frame appeared the distinctive shape of a mitre hat.