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You’re giving me that room? No way

September 03, 2008 | Hospitality Industry

The New York Times on how for some hotel guests changing rooms upon arrival has become a routine. Like the theater, where one can pay $120 for a fifth-row center orchestra seat or a seat in the 24th row, a traveler can pay the same amount for a room with a better view or in better condition than another at the same price.

When C. Leonard Gordon, a venture capitalist, travels with his wife, Margot, an art dealer, he never goes straight to the assigned hotel room with her. “Instead, I sit with the luggage in the lobby and read until she’s decided on a room,” he said. “She usually rejects the first one or two they show her. So I don’t go up with her after we check in, unless I feel like I need exercise.”

The fussy Mrs. Gordon is not alone. At Shutters on the Beach, in Santa Monica, Calif., about five customers a day ask for their rooms to be changed, said Klaus Mennekes, the hotel’s managing director. At the 3,500-room Atlantis Hotel in Nassau, room-change requests can number as many as 200 a day, said George Markantonis, the hotel’s president and managing director. And the staff at the 450-room Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain, gets about 30 room-change requests daily, Ricard Casimiro, the front-of-the-house manager, said.

Get the full story at The New York Times

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