This is one of the reasons that air bnb is so disruptive to the market. For a lower price you get on average a much better staying experience with the place having no upsells.
I’ve found it worthwhile to ask for free WiFi if you state you’re traveling as a tourist or for personal reasons and it’s obviously not for business. It might also help if you’re in their frequent nights club. I’ve had the front desk clerk just take a sticker off of a pad and put it on my room key envelope. Anyone try this?
The Hilton breakfast buffet is worth what you pay for. So is the Super 8 breakfast buffet.
As long as you can put up with the total lack of traveler’s conveniences that hotels offer business and even tourist trade - such as those who spend a week or more a month in such accommodations.
The “it worked for my BFF and me when we backpacked across _____” model doesn’t apply to everyone.
Yes, but nice hotels aren’t Veblen goods, generally.
When you wear an expensive watch or drive an expensive car, everyone who sees your watch and car thinks “look at that rich guy!” But when you stay in a fancy hotel, that’s generally a mostly-invisible expenditure that doesn’t raise your social status much.
I suppose if you’re meeting clients for business, it’s better to meet them at the Waldorf Astoria than the Super 8, and I guess you can get a little social status out of telling people you stayed at a certain resort (although that can pretty easily backfire on you and make you look very shallow).
Instead, expensive hotels are expensive because they offer more amenities, finer furnishings, and better locations. The various other services that are bundled in with cheap hotels are either unimportant (who reads USA today anyway), insufficient (I’m on vacation, I’m going out for brunch, not eating a hardboiled egg and a waffle made from a mix bought by the drum), or cheap enough to add in for the richer customers who stay at nice hotels.
A lot of this is just the need to upgrade. More modern business hotels have lots of outlets on the desk. Older ones have them behind the massive bed and often totally filled, or in places with no tables so you have to put your charger on the floor.
I’ve seen the wifi situation get much better in the past few years. I suspect this was high on the complaint list, especially for those places who charge and then give crappy bandwidth.
I don’t know. Every business traveller hotel I have stayed at for the past 10 years has always had complimentary breakfast. And its obvious, business travellers are away from home and family; they will want as much convenience as possible. Its the tourists, who are with family and who wish to visit the sites, who don’t care much about the food.
In the past I rarely stayed at high-end hotels where my professional conferences were being held. But it ate too much of my compensated expenses, so now I stay at much less expensive places within walking or short driving distance of the conference/meeting.
I think the bottom line on the upcharges and ludicrous prices (like $2.50 for a can of soda) is that hotels figure if you’re rich/foolish enough to pay upwards of $200-$250 a night for a room, you won’t mind being gouged on the smaller stuff. (if you have an unlimited expense account, then it’s your employer who’s wealthy/foolish enough to pay through the nose for such things).
Typically in the higher-end places, you go down to the restaurant and order what you want, and a waiter brings it out.
Plus, the beds are nicer, the TVs are bigger, the toiletries are more high-end, towels are larger and fluffier, etc…
There is definitely a difference between high-end hotels and mid-range ones, and you pay for it. It’s just that some places and patrons prioritize some things more than others.
This thread kind of makes me think about the people who complain about not getting sides with their steaks at high-end restaurants.
For meals, I agree. The Wifi thing is more like complaining about not getting water with your steaks, since it is provided for free most other places and costs the hotel little marginally.
Way OT, but have you noticed how the receptacles in hotel rooms have virtually no retention force? The plugs barely stay in them. I am surprised there aren’t more electrical fires at hotels…
I have, actually. You have to pinch the prongs a bit to get them to stick, which I’ve always been told is an unhealthy thing to do.
I think the last Hyatt Place I stayed in got it right. On the wall between the double beds was a bank of six receptacles and four USB ports. Easy access, more outlets than we needed, especially with the USB ports.
Some higher end hotels (higher end than Holiday inn express, anyway) do have breakfast buffets. But 1) they aren’t free 2) they are in the restaurant, not a breakfast room off the lobby in a hotel that lacks a restaurant 3)The food is prepared by people who prepare food for a living , the same ones who will cook your breakfast if you order off he menu rather than the buffet. It’s not cereal,baked goods and you-make-em waffles with possibly some pre-cooked eggs and/or pancakes that were heated up by the person at the front desk.
I’ve been to several where it was a sort of “bespoke” buffet in the restaurant*; rather than a line of steam tables, they had a series of stations set up around the dining room where there were cooks who’d cook you up a custom omelet, or eggs, or pancakes, etc…
- Probably the most interesting was when my wife and I stayed in the Hotel Intercontinental in Budapest on our honeymoon. Apparently there’s a lot of international business going on in downtown Pest, because the restaurant in the hotel had one of these buffets, but you could get stuff from all over- miso soup, etc… from Japan, langos from Hungary, custom omelets/eggs/2 types of bacon/sausages, pancakes/waffles, etc…
I stayed at a Hilton a couple years ago (it was the meeting hotel, although the meetings were not in the hotel but in a convention center connected to it by an enclosed walkway). They asked me to rate the hotel and I ranted about the absurd $15/night charge for Wi-Fi. I got back an irate letter explaining the reasons (non-existent IMHO). If you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it. Never use Hilton again.
This. You don’t get less for your money, you get different. Whether that difference is worth it or not is completely up to you. I’ve stayed in 5-star hotels and I’ve stayed in Motel 6. Just depends on the specific circumstances.