Lots of e-mails about the Las Vegas video I linked to yesterday. About a dozen of you think that the other name on the Sands marquee under that of Jack Jones is Rich Little. Okay.
Christopher Bay (Hi, Christopher!), Michael Miller and a few others inform me that the reference to "The Band" on the Caesars Palace signage is not the musical group by that name. It's actually a production of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway gay-themed play, The Boys in the Band. It opened the Roman Theatre at Caesars that year.
Meanwhile, my post about hotel rooms brought an e-mail from my longtime buddy Joe Brancatelli…as I guess I knew it would. Joe knows more about air travel and travel-in-general than anyone I know and the following is an excerpt from an even longer e-mail. Even this is so long I'm going to interrupt a few times to respond…
Some of your questions have easy answers. The "resort/destination fee" is, of course, a scam. Online sites and and third-party bookers such as Expedia only display the "nightly rate." But if you add a destination fee, it gets buried later as part of the taxes/fees line. So a hotel that would normally charge $90 a night can scam the unsuspecting customer by advertising a $60 rate and burying a $30 destination fee on the last page.
It's despicable and nasty and I now have a policy: I simply won't stay in a place that charges destination or resort fees. And when I book away, I send a note to the G.M. telling him/her that they lost my business because of the fee.
Agree it's despicable and it scams unsuspecting customers. But I think my last few trips to Vegas, I got what seemed to me the best room at the best rate by factoring in the resort fee. Harrah's, as I recall, gave me a "free room" because of my Harrahs card. I just had to pay their resort fee which was still less than the options I had for any room where I didn't pay a resort fee.
I object to it because it's insulting…and I'm sure it does deceive tourists who don't know how to do math. Then again, Las Vegas was built on tourists who don't know how to do math.
Now, as for the lack of USB ports and electrical outlets where they should be, might I suggest you stay at newer hotels? Older properties (anything built before the 2000s, for sure) must retrofit this stuff and it's expensive. But newly built properties know that this stuff is key to a happy stay.
Many have USB ports built into sidetables or headboards. New-wave clock radios have them, too. Older hotels that are paying attention do use workarounds (the clock radio with built-in USB ports, for instance.) And, of course, they are all switching to "smart TVs" that allow you to connect to everything from Netflix to Spotify without even using your own devices.
And remember, hotels spent decades buying and amortizing the cost of expensive phone systems. Think of all those wires in the walls! Now they have rooms with phones in the bathrooms even — and no one uses anything but their mobile. Makes older hotels a little wary of jumping on stuff that requires going into walls and running up big costs.
Agreed…though that "free room" at Harrah's was newly-refurbished and had USB ports. There just weren't enough of them, nor were they placed where they were handy.
I wonder how long it's going to be before hotel rooms have their own special version of Alexa or some other A.I. servant who'll tell you the time, set an alarm, bring you more towels, place a room service order, answer certain questions, book restaurant reservations and so on, all at voice commands. Someone's got to be developing that now. Or does that already exist somewhere?
Several of the other items on your list — not enough hangers, hooks for garment bags, etc. — believe it or not have to do with the switch from old CRT TVs to flat panels. Back in the day, to accommodate TVs, hotels needed a chest of drawers or an armoire to handle the bulk.
But now that the TV is a flat panel and hangs on a wall, they don't need armoires or drawers anymore. So the rooms shrink (average room size in the U.S. 20 years ago was 350sf, now you'll find newly built rooms under 200sf) and you won't find closets or armoires or drawers at all! Plus, as we've moved to casual business attire, there isn't a lot of people whining "Oh, my suit! Oh, cocktail dress! Where can I hang them? People basically live out of their suitcases now…
That's true. Years ago when Carolyn and I traveled, we both — out of habit, I guess — would check into a hotel and do a lot of unpacking, putting this in that drawer, that in this drawer, etc. It was always a problem when it came time to check out because we had to reverse the process and that always took more time than expected.
The last few trips I took with Amber, neither of us did that. Just about everything stayed in our suitcases except clothes that needed to be hung up for wrinkle-removal. I got a little "kit" that held everything I need in the bathroom so unpacking was just a matter of moving it from my suitcase to the bathroom and packing just meant putting it back. We could vacate a room in ten minutes.
On switches and stuff, well, welcome to existing properties. Every damned lamp in a hotel has its own kind of switch. I was once in a hotel that three TVs — one in the living room, one in each of the two bedrooms. Each TV had its own remote, of course — but no remote worked for anything but its specific TV. You'd think the remotes would be universal.
No, I wouldn't. What if Amber's watching one TV in one room and I'm watching a different program in another? We'd be changing each other's channels.
But, of course, the TVs were placed at different times over the lifespan of the hotel. Ditto lamps and switches. Think of our own house. Do all the switches work the same way? Course not. Hotel rooms are the same way. Equipment changes and it is hard for a hotel owner to make everything match.
Too many pillows? Yup, it's a cheap amenity. You put 10 pillows on a bed, the average guest thinks it's luxury and may ignore the fact that the bed is lumpy and should have been replaced several years ago. Of course, this has been changing during the pandemic as hotels have rushed to eliminate "touch points" that required cleaning. So pillows are disappearing. So are pads and pencils and tent cards promoting stuff.
Know what's also disappearing? Printed guest guides. Once upon a time, hotel rooms had two books: The Bible and the Guest Book that explained services and products and procedures. But printed stuff is disappearing now, partially for cost and partially because guests are increasingly more comfortable with stuff displayed on the TV monitor. Plus keep in mind that some things (Internet, for instance) is farmed out to third parties. The hotels literally don't know how it works. It's maintained by third parties and you have to call the third party for tech support…
Yeah…and the third party support never seems to know anything — if they even answer. I'll bet it would be a selling point for some travelers if a hotel could advertise, "Internet Expert on site."
Lastly, hooks and grab bars and such. In the end, it's about cost. Not that the items themselves are expensive. But installing them is (they can't come modular, as many hotels are now made) and they must be installed by a human being. Worse, bars and hooks eventually come loose and break walls and bathroom tiles. That, too, requires human intervention for repairs. All very expensive.
More expensive than having guests slip and injure themselves and sue?
Ever since I had my knee replaced, I kind of need a hotel room with a little more than the norm in terms of handrails and grab bars in the shower…but not as much as in what they call an "accessible" room with a lower bed and a roll-in shower and such. Once in a while when I ask for a room with a shower that isn't a tub/shower combo, they stick me in one of those rooms and I feel bad because I might be taking up one that is needed by someone who requires all that. And the lower bed is worse for me, not better.
I understand the reasons for a lot of these things. In most cases, it's money but that doesn't mean that I can't complain that they aren't spending that money. As I noted here, a shower caddy costs under $20 and the cleaning lady could "install" it in five seconds.
Anyway, my thanks to Joe Brancatelli and all who wrote. Joe operates the best business travelers' website on the web, JoeSentMe. If you subscribe to it, you don't need any other site to tell you how to fly, where to stay, how to get through customs, why the travel business is the way it is and so forth. There's also plenty of useful info there if you don't subscribe but if you travel much, you'll want to subscribe.