People stay at hotels for all kinds of reasons. For leisure guests, it’s common to travel for some sort of a special occasion, like a birthday, anniversary, or honeymoon. Many travelers will let hotels know of those special occasions in advance, in hopes of scoring something extra.
The thing is, it seems like these kinds of initiatives lead to disappointment almost as often as they delight, so to me it raises an interesting question — what should hotels really do for guests, and what is it reasonable to expect?
In this post:
Reading between the lines, I picked up a couple of points:
- It’s hard for hotels to manage expectations, since people expect that they’re going to get some sort of special treatment when they’re celebrating something, but when so many people are “special,” it becomes harder to deliver
- There has definitely been an increasing trend of people claiming they’re celebrating an anniversary, without actually substantiating it; I mean, there are an endless number of social media posts out there telling people that a “hack” to get something for free at a hotel is to just claim it’s a special occasion (some hotels have even started asking guests to prove special occasions)
So all of this raises the question of what hotels are really expected to deliver when a guest is celebrating a special occasion. Admittedly I think the answer should vary based on the size of the hotel, the cost of the hotel, and how special of an occasion it is. However, that still leaves a lot of questions:
A great solo travel tip spotted this week on One Mile at a Time.
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