Back in the eighties and early nineties, I spent an awful lot of time in Las Vegas. It seemed like I was there practically every week and on at least two occasions, I flew back to L.A. for some important meeting, then scurried back to the airport and returned to Vegas after only about a one-hour stopover at my house. I was in Vegas a lot for about seven reasons…
- I had a lot of hotel comps (i.e., free rooms).
- I found that I could get a lot of work done if I could get away from the phone. Nowadays, of course, we all take our phones with us everywhere we go.
- I was dating a showgirl there.
- I was…well, not exactly hooked on Card Counting at Blackjack but I'd gotten pretty good at it and if you have that ability, you want to explore it.
- I had various ways of getting backstage at hotels there and hanging out with Vegas performers. I love show business and that often felt more to me like it than working on a network TV program.
- It was raining a lot in Los Angeles and I don't like rain. When it rains in Vegas and you're inside a big hotel, the rain's impact on you is negligible.
- And I'm sure I had at least one more but I can't think of it at the moment.
So one time around 1988, I didn't have a free room available but I had a coupon from the Riviera Hotel for three nights @ $22 a night. As I was arriving on a Friday, that was a tremendous bargain. You could get a rate like that at many hotels for Sunday through Thursday nights but Friday and Saturday were at least double that, sometimes triple. I called up and a lady on the phone verified that, indeed, the coupon was valid any night of the week so I booked three nights — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — and my credit card was charged twenty-two bucks plus tax for the first night. CUT TO:
THE FRONT DESK OF THE RIVIERA HOTEL, where a clerk there informed me that that rate was not available on a Friday check-in, which is what I was attempting to do. I showed him the coupon and he agreed it said nothing on it about dates when it was not valid. "That doesn't matter," he said. Their cheapest room, which is all I wanted, was $52 a night and no coupon could overrule that.
I pointed out that the hotel had already charged me for the first night to "guarantee" my room and they'd charged me $22. There was no disagreement that they'd done that but he explained that only guaranteed my room. If I wanted to actually inhabit my room and sleep in it, I would have to give them $30 more for the first night and $52 for Saturday night. That struck me as a very odd definition of the phrase "guaranteed" with regard to a room reservation. And then, to add insult to my financial injury, I'd have to pay $52 for Sunday night since at the Riviera then, your rate was based on when you checked in. "If you want," he said, "you can check out on Sunday and then immediately check back in and we can give you the $22 rate."
I argued. Managers got involved. The line of suitcase-toting folks behind me grew longer and more impatient and I always feel guilty when I'm keeping people waiting. That put more pressure on me…but oddly enough not among those who worked the front desk. They didn't care how the hell long the line got.
Finally, negotiations hit one of those "take-it-or-leave-it" moments: I could stay there Sunday night for $22 — and stay in the same room without checking out and in, and they acted like they were giving me a great, generous concession in conceding that much. If I wanted to stay there Friday and Saturday night, it would be $82 more, plus taxes. End of dickering.
I said, "If I go somewhere else, you'll refund my $22 deposit, of course." The manager said, "We're not authorized to do that, sir. We can credit it to your room payment if you stay but the reservation clearly states that such fees are non-refundable." If I wanted my twenty-two smackers back, I had to take that up with someone else — the Senior Vice-President of Price Gouging, I believe. Whoever it was, he'd already left for the weekend and might not be back 'til Monday or even Tuesday.
This must have taken a half-hour and finally, I reached a peek of pique. I don't get angry very often and to make that happen, you usually have to harm someone I care about. But I got riled over all this and suddenly found myself telling them I wouldn't be staying in their crummy excuse for a hotel then or ever, and my lawyer would be talking to them about the $22 deposit. And with that, I grabbed my rolling suitcase in one hand and my laptop case in the other and I stormed out and headed directly to…
…well, nowhere. I had gone too far to reverse course when I realized I had nowhere to go.
The Desert Inn was next door so I shlepped my luggage and laptop over there, which took a helluva lot of shlepping. Exhausted, I waited twenty minutes in a long line at that front desk only to be told that the only available rooms were $200 and up. That was per night. Then I located a pay phone and began calling around.
Another half-hour later, much of it spent on hold, the best deal I'd found was a room at the off-strip Palace Station. The price for three nights? $178. I also penalized myself in other ways: The effort of dragging my gear around, the exasperation, the waste of about two hours of my trip, etc. The Palace Station was also not near the Riviera, nor was it near certain places I planned to go and could have walked to from Riviera. So if you're keeping a running tally of how much more it cost me to not just take what the Riviera wanted, add on another $20-$30 in cab fares…and don't forget all these amounts are before taxes.
But I sure showed that Riviera Hotel, didn't I?
No, not really. Not in the slightest then. I'm sure they didn't lose any business. If the hotel next door was getting $200+ for rooms, we can assume someone else snatched up the $52 room I walked out on. The Riv also kept my $22 deposit. I wasted still another half-hour on the phone the following Tuesday (it's always a half-hour with these people) trying to get that back and the best they'd do was issue it to me as credit be used the next time I stayed at the Riviera. Like I was ever going back there.
Bottom line: I didn't hurt the Riviera one bit. I hurt myself. I would have been so much better off paying the Riviera the $104…and no, it was not fair. Show me where it ever says life is always fair.
What I did accomplish though was to teach myself a fine lesson. Sometimes, you can't win. No matter how clever or reasonable or unreasonable you are, you have limited options and none of them are great. All you can do is to pick the one that's the least rotten…the one that does the last amount of damage to you. I try to remember that to this day.
But before I end this: I don't want to leave you with the impression that I didn't get the last laugh on the Riviera Hotel. I can't tell you how I did it because I may need to use this technique again some day when another hotel foolishly wrongs me. But thanks to a series of events that I personally set in motion, the morning of June 14th, 2016, the Riviera Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was imploded and it's now gone forever. And yes, it took thirty years but that's the beauty of it. They never expected it.
