Late Night Arrival
After nearly 10 hours of travel to get from Minneapolis to Miami, then another hour in stop-and-go traffic at 1 AM (yes, I'm not making this up), we finally arrived at our hotel around 1:30 AM to a rude surprise. The hotel was overbooked, and there was no room for us.
Never mind that, had we not arrived at all, the hotel would still have charged us for a night in a room they didn't have (due to their 24-hour cancellation policy). Not only was there no room in the hotel we had booked, there was no room in any other hotel within five miles.
Apparently, this is a big weekend for people visiting Miami Beach. Don't ask me why, though it might have something to do with a huge international SCUBA convention which ended yesterday, and the quasi-holiday on Monday. The net result was that everybody for 50 miles in any direction was converging on South Beach to party at midnight.
Hence the hour stuck in traffic at 1 AM, for what would normally be 20-25 minutes, and the lack of any hotel rooms any closer than downtown. It was close to 3 AM by the time we got to our rooms in the Inter-Continental (the backup hotel). The clerks at the Loews (our original hotel) had to first call to make sure there was room, then do a lot of paperwork, make us sign forms, and so forth. When we got to the Inter-Continental, the clerks there had to call back to Loews, then get approval from someone somewhere deep inside the corporate bowels to bill Loews for our rooms.
Not that this was all bad. We get a night of hotel free, plus about $30 bucks cash for excess cab fare.
Still, it rankles, At 1:30 AM, I'd rather just have the bed.
Just as with airlines, overbooking hotels is a statistical game of chicken: the hotel is betting that enough people will cancel or not show to make up for the overbooking. In this case, though, there are a couple things which really annoy me:
Had we not showed up, Loews would have charged us for the first night in the hotel, even though they knew no rooms were available. At least the airlines will let you re-use part of the value of a ticket.
Unlike the airlines, the individual traveler has no choice about giving up a reservation, and worse, the travelers who lose are the ones who arrive very late and most desperate for a place to sleep.
In this instance, I can console myself with the thought that Loews lost its statistical game of chicken. Or maybe not--maybe they collected enough of those penalty charges from no-shows to pay for what they lost in the two of us who got bumped.
Still, it used to be that you held a hotel room with a credit card precisely because you planned to arrive late and wanted to make absolutely sure there was a room. Somehow, somewhere along the line, this morphed into you always give a credit card just to make the reservation, and this still doesn't guarantee that they'll have a room for you.
As an aside, I've heard rumors that American Express will actually pull the merchant account of a hotel which fails to have a room available if you reserve it on an AmEx card. Apparently, this clause is in the merchant agreements for all the major card companies, but only AmEx takes it seriously enough to enforce it. If this is true, it is one of the few things which would justify the fees AmEm charges its cardholders.
Update: 1:30 PM
Arrived back at Loews, and they were very apologetic about bumping us last night. It would have been better if they'd been more apologetic at the time they were bumping, but at least they're trying to take care of it. Got an upgrade out of the deal, and I didn't even have to ask. Ocean view: even though I won't be leaving the hotel during the conference, at least I will get to see what I'm missing.