A gent who has worked the front desk at many hotels delivers 10 Hotel Secrets from Behind the Front Desk. Personally, slipping a twenty to the desk clerk has never resulted in a better room for me, not even in Vegas. Being funny and polite sometimes has.
About Number 6, "Never, ever pay for the minibar": Nothing in those ever interests me and I've heard that nothing in them ever really interests anyone who doesn't have an employer covering the hotel bill. A producer I knew once told me a funny story. He was doing a long city-to-city-to-city road trip with his wife and mother-in-law and one night, they stopped at a fancy hotel — he and his wife in one room, her mother in another. The next day, as they headed for the next town, they were driving along and he said, "Gee, I wish I had some chocolate."
From the back seat came the voice of Mom-in-Law: "Oh, I have some." And she dug around in one of her bags and came up with a bar of Toblerone chocolate.
As he munched on it, he said, "That was smart, bringing that along," and she said, "Oh, it was in the room." He said, "You took it from the mini-bar?" She said, "Of course. I took everything! Considering how much that room cost per night, I wasn't going to leave anything behind." She thought it was like the free shampoo. When he got his bill, there was an extra $1,100 on it.
I had something like that happen to me once at the Gaslamp Hilton in San Diego during Comic-Con. Carolyn and I were staying there and we'd been promised a refrigerator in the room, which was necessary because of some medicine she was taking. The hotel was all out of those little mini-refrigerators they bring up so they told us we could empty out the mini-bar and use that. We did — and it was apparently the kind where each item has a little sensor sticker on it so that when it's removed, a computer somewhere in the building knows this and adds the appropriate charge to your bill. When I checked out, I had something like $1,250 on mine, including a $100 charge for one particular mini-bottle of wine about the size of a cranberry.
The hotel realized the mistake even before I pointed it out to them and the clerk said, "Don't worry…we'll take it all off your bill." The big problem was that he had to do it by hand, an item at a time, so it took twenty minutes. I should've grabbed the jar of nuts in the first place. They'd never have known and I always wondered what $30 cashews tasted like.