It may be tradition, or common law. But do you have a cite that it’s actually illegal, in modern America, to refuse to rent a hotel room to someone on arbitrary grounds? Information posted in this thread seems to indicate it is quite common.
Come in sober, as a family, with bags, wearing decent clothes and prepared to pay a deposit. Tell your story politely upfront. If all else fails, you can usually find someone to rent to you, you just might have to shop around a bit.
It doesn’t seem fair that it’s so much at the discretion of the clerk, but it’s worth remember that many motels are family run operations. When I clerked, I stayed in the manager’s apartment (converted from four hotel rooms) right behind the front desk. I would be on 24 hour duty for up to a week at a time, and would hope that once the night’s guests were checked in, I’d be able to sleep for a bit before waking up to set up the continental breakfast. Normally the managing couple lived there with their family, but when I clerked I’d be completely alone. When the managing couple lives there, that’s their entire life- you are living 24 hours at your work site and dealing with every problem that comes up.
So one guest yelling or getting arrested or throwing a party isn’t just a bad day at work. It’s a night that you and your family don’t sleep. If you are alone, a bad guest can also be pretty scary. I’ve been woken up by guests going bonkers, and you really really don’t want to call the cops because that will hurt business that took you years to build up. So you are stuck there alone in the middle of the night with some crazy situation happening trying to figure out how to do damage control without putting yourself at risk.
Once you get burned like that a few times, you stop taking chances. It’s a lot more prudent to pass up a small amount of revenue and not risk those situations happening.
So what do you tell them? You obviously haven’t told them there are no vacancies, which would have been said at the get-go. It’s not until after you’ve seen their ID (or at least asked for a home address) that you say you won’t rent them a room. How the hell do you explain it then, and what’s wrong with the simple truth? It seems that other places mentioned in this thread do it. Are they owned/managed by noobs?
In a situation like this, has a blonde, pretty, slightly anxious single woman with a large purse ever checked in unannounced late at night?
Can this happen with a priceline or other online reservation? I’d think that would be a binding contract for a room with the hotel.
Yeah, how do you quote locals different rates? I regularly do unplanned road trips that have me staying in motels or hotels for the night when I had no idea I would be in that town when I woke up in the morning.
I have never given a clerk an ID or any way of knowing who I am first until after I’ve asked if they have rooms and they’ve said yes and how much they’d be. The only question I’ve ever had is how many people would be staying in the room and, sometime, if I have pets.
Also never had any trouble booking local hotels (when family visits I’ll often go get a room, pay for it and register and then just hand off the key when they arrive).
Not denying it happens, I just don’t see where in the process it would happen, especially if you don’t want to admit why.
I’m amazed to hear some hotels have this policy. I often hear radio ads for hotels encouraging local folks to come for weekend getaways, offering package deals with restaurants, museums, sporting events, big concerts, etc.
“No room at the inn, huh? Well… do you have a manger my 23 skeevy friends and I could use?”
Springfield MO is still very much a white city, isn’t it? I visit every now and then, and non-whites seem to be pretty rare, though that might just be because of the areas that I frequent. So your wife might very well have been refused because the clerk suspected her of being a working girl.
Personally, I like the Lamplighter South, even if it does have a girly place right next door. The Lamplighter is pretty convenient to most of the places I need to get to, and it’s nice to be able to go to Ziggy’s at any hour of the day or night without going outside. It’s not a four star hotel, but you don’t pay four star prices, either.
It happened to me in Vegas, but at a youth hostel.
Not really.
I was driving to visit a friend in Georgia and all I can remember is she lived outside of Atlanta.
I should have made it to her house that night but there was a huge accident on the highway and when it took me an hour to go 2 miles I got off at the nearest exit and checked into the first motel I found.
Well, those are unlikely to be the sort of place that attracts a person looking for the cheapest possible way he and his seven best friends can get shitfaced in private.
That’s kind of what’s so n00by about it: you decide if you will have them first, then you take it from there. If you really want to get out of it later there is plenty you can still do, such as quote a ridiculous price like even sven said.
And yes, those other places are managed by n00bs too!
Exactly. I worked at a basic, clean, but ultimately cheap motel. Our location was near a major seasonal tourist attraction, but otherwise in a somewhat divey neighborhood. It was like a beacon for skeevy locals looking for cheap thrills. A more upscale hotel would be a different situation.
Remember that the practice isn’t universal. Clerks are judging you from the moment you drive in to see if you look like a normal tourist (bags, right kind of car for the price range, family or obvious spouse in tow) or something else. They know their traffic patterns very well… If something seemed strange to me (walk in, late night, no car or bags, solo or obviously trying to hide someone halfway down the block or furtively text messaging someone or whatever), I’d casually ask for the ID first, and if it was a local I’d quote an absurd rate or apologize that there was a computer problem and we were actually sold out. If I’d gotten too late in the process, sometimes I’d say “Oh yeah, we’ll need a $300 cash deposit” or say the credit card machine was down.
But even at my place, we might take a chance on a local if the night was slow enough and the price we quoted them was high enough. An arrest on an empty winter night is not the same as an arrest in a house of packed repeat guests at the height of tourist season. It really varies from person to person, hotel to hotel, and even night to night. It’s a constant balance of weighing risks with potential returns.
You know, it wasn’t until I read this thread just now that an incident that happened to me and two friends over 20 years ago finally makes sense.
I was a young naval officer stationed in upstate New York, getting ready to move to Groton, Connecticut to attend Submarine School at the U.S. Navy base there. A few weeks before I was to be transferred, I drove down to Groton with a couple of buddies to scope out the area.
We left without much a plan, checked out the submarine base and the surrounding area (including Mystic, Connecticut), then found out that the base had no short term rentals available at the BOQ (Bachelor Officer’s Quarters), which we’d planned to use. We then decided to get a motel room in the area for the night before driving back home the next day.
I remember it was getting pretty late and we didn’t have a reservation anywhere. We checked out several area motels, and everyone told us that they were full. :rolleyes: I remember we got on the highway, and drove up I-95 all the way to Providence, and nobody would rent us a room. I remember we were told at every place that they were completely booked up, so in desperation we finally decided to sleep in the car in the last motel’s parking lot.
I never can sleep in a car (especially in a car with three people trying to sleep), so I remember going back to the motel office at 2 a.m. and insisting on a room. The guy said that they actually did have an empty room, but it was reserved. I told him that if whoever reserved it wasn’t there by 2 a.m., they probably weren’t going to show, and talked him into renting me the room so I could sleep. (One friend took the other bed, and the third guy just stayed in the car.)
Anyway, I always took what we were told at face value until now. It never occurred to me that a motel would be reluctant to rent a room to three guys in their early 20s who showed up late at night without a reservation.
Yup. Sorry, I would probably not have rented to you. This is so much more of a red flag than just being from the area. What I would’ve done is apologise for being full and send you on to a youth hostel.
Three young guys is waaay more trouble. They’ll get drunk, throw up, hassle me, hassle other female guests. Pff, no thanks! (Not saying you were like that!)
You would’ve been better off going in alone, making sure you look fresh and nice, being polite etc.
Yeah, last time I took a chance on three young guys, they invited about twenty people over, got roaring drunk, and tried to BBQ in their rooms! They set off the fire alarms and nearly set off the sprinklers. We had to evacuate the entire place in the middle of the night amid flashing firetruck lights.
That’s basically every manager’s nightmare.
Is there a new version of Google Earth that allows us to go into a building to see a sign on a counter?
Alice, I have to admit I’m unclear re your obvious implication a racial slight is being made by jacobsta811. He’s (assuming he) is quite clearly referencing the fact that a young woman seeking a hotel in a town where she resides is open to suspicion regardless of race.
Were they a rock and roll band? I hear that’s part of the job description.
I stayed in a few backpackers in Australia who would not rent beds to anyone without a non-Australian passport. Not just no locals, no-one from the same country.
It did seem a bit extreme to me, but it wasn’t that rare.