You ask for a room with a two double beds non-smoking but when you get to the hotel they give you a room with a king sized bed smoking (or some other type situation). The hotel is legally not liable for anything here because there’s fine print on the reservation website and or the phone clerk will make a disclaimer that “We’ll request that for you” but they can’t guarantee a particular type of room, only a room.
I always found this to be a major cop-out and also a major pain in the ass to the (minimum wage+$2 earning) desk clerk who has to take the ass chewing while the reservation clerks and managers are at home watching American Idol by a husband and wife who don’t want to share a king sized bed with their teenaged twins.
Also:
Adjoining rooms means “next door to each other”
Connecting rooms means “next door to each other with a connecting room”
This causes lots of mixups as well, PLUS hotels really can’t guarantee that connecting rooms will be available upon arrival, though sometimes reservation clerks will all but promise them.
smaje1, you’re not really impressing anyone with your junior modding.
And I find it real curious that you claim that I help no one, since you yourself in your own thread “liked” one of my suggestions and found it “worth suggesting” to the landlord
I used to work in a reservation center and I always loved this one. We would ‘confirm’ a king non-smoking room but not guarantee it. It makes sense from the hotel’s perspective as I can confirm that I am booking a king n/s room at that point but I have no idea if it will actually be available at the time of arrival. There could be something that takes the room out of order, a guest extends their stay and runs into your reserved time so we move you to a 2 bedded room, the room that you were blocked into was a connector that needed by a family last minute. This doesn’t make it any easier to explain to a guest.
That was for leisure travel. For a contracted group you didn’t even get the pleasure of having your room confirmed. You can request but we will end up putting you in whatever room type of that category is available.
Wholesale bookings were something that we absolutely could not touch. The reservation was locked up in our system and we could not even add a note. With price matching and such, I always wondered why guests would book with these companies and give up a more reasonable cancel policy along with the customer service that we would otherwise be able to provide.
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There could be something that takes the room out of order, a guest extends their stay and runs into your reserved time so we move you to a 2 bedded room
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That’s a very frequent situation and people who don’t work in hotels have no idea how near impossible it is to do anything about that. If somebody checks in for two nights, even if they know full well the hotel is full on the third night, it’s extremely difficult to force them to leave. You can ask, you can make it unpleasant if you want to, you can have them sign at checkin that they know the room’s not available that night, but when it comes down to it- if they decide they don’t want to leave and their credit card is good, there’s not a whole lot you can do to make them leave.
You can terminate the key card, but if their luggage is on the inside a hotel employee will have to go in and physically remove it and this opens up all kinds of liability issues. (“The bellman stole my Faberge eggs that were on my nightstand and caused that rip on my Armani gown- prove he didn’t”.) Obviously you don’t want to send a security guard to drag them kicking or screaming from the room. Basically you have to rely on the person’s civility and fair play and some folks, especially when they’re away from home, just don’t have any to spare.
We do confirm the bed arrangement in a room, except under very rare circumstances, but where I work isn’t a regular hotel. We do a few things differently. 95% of what’s been said here, though, I am down with.
Requests are just that. Please have a backup plan or be prepared to deal if we just can’t make your request work. We really try to. But sometimes it’s just not possible.
At least I don’t have to worry if anybody will end up in a smoking room as we don’t have any. Smoking rooms suck for non-smokers.
I can assure you that Orbitz, not the hotel, charged the OP for the room. The hotel receives absolutely nothing if the person does not stay at the hotel. The guest has a contract with the wholesaler, not the hotel, and it is up to the wholesaler to “make it right” for the OP, whatever the reason for the reservation’s failure.
(And I won’t continue to flagellate this particular equine. No vital signs.)
One of the reasons why I always call a hotel before I book: I ask them how old the property is and was it always a smoke-free building.
I don’t care how well they cleaned it up—if the third floor was the “smoking floor” six years ago I will still be able to smell the stink of stale smoke.
And yes, I call before booking and then after, to make sure all is well.
I would prefer to deal with the hotel directly for the room, and will take the advice given here to get the same rate. Unfortunately, the online sites are starting to obfuscate things so much in order to get you to buy air, car, and hotel from them.
I’ll have to ask how long it’s been, but we’ve been nonsmoking for several years at least, since well before I arrived three years ago. I’ve been told it was more of a pain than it was worth to maintain even a handful of smoking rooms. This undoubtedly sucks for smokers in the winter. But it saves the rest of us from smelling it. They can just deal.
That being said, the place is 75 years old, though has been through extensive remodels and such over the years. I promise you it wasn’t nonsmoking back then. But I have never noticed as much as a whiff of the stuff, and I’m in there every day.
One other question you might ask, though, is the configuration of the property. The hotel where I work is an older property, and we even now have smoking rooms (which is, surprisingly, a bonus for lots of people. Smoking rooms are getting pretty hard to find.) However, our rooms are in four separate buildings. The 100 and 300 buildings are completely non-smoking and pet-free. The 200 and 400 buildings house all of our smoking and pet-friendly rooms.
It’s really an ideally convenient set-up for our target demographic, although it might not work for everyone.
ETA: I just re-read what you posted, and realized that you asked hotels whether it had always been a non-smoking building. Obviously, you can ignore my well-meant advice. I won’t delete, though, because maybe it’s helpful to someone else.