On the Road: A Website Offers Help Finding a Hotel Where You Can Light Up

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On the Road: Barrage of Fees Is Starting To Follow Fliers to the Hotel

This year, hotels in the United States will collect an estimated $2.1 billion in fees and surcharges, up from $2 billion in 2012, according to a new analysis by the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.

Of course, that’s small potatoes compared with the airline industry’s revenue from fees, which totaled $6 billion last year just in charges for checked bags and for changing an itinerary. Still, “the airline industry has created great cover that has emboldened the hotel industry,” said Bjorn Hanson, the divisional dean at the center.

Fee revenue has more than doubled in the last 10 years, as many hotels, especially convention, resort and luxury ones, add charges to the bill for services like the use of a business center or an Internet connection, and in some cases apply so-called resort fees that essentially are surcharges for using the hotel’s facilities.

Fees are also being added at some hotels for early checkout, receiving faxes and overnight packages, automatic gratuities and even things like minibar restocking, availability of in-room safes and mandatory valet parking.

Hey, don’t get me started. While attending a conference at a resort hotel in Phoenix two years ago, I was amazed to find a $12 charge for porterage — bellhop service, even though, like many of you, I always wheel my own bags. And charges for housekeeping service — that is, making your bed and cleaning your room — also turn up here and there.

Some readers even tell me that they have encountered charges for a donation to a local charity tacked onto a hotel bill.

And as I noted last week when I checked into the Hilton Bayfront Hotel in San Diego, the clerk asked me if I wanted to pay an extra $20 for a room with a better view. Not paying it got me a 19th-floor room by the elevators with a view of the maritime docks where trucks were unloading a banana boat. (This, actually, turned out to be interesting to watch, and I avoided the $20 surcharge.)

The hotel also charged $13.95 for basic Internet service and $19.95 for faster-speed service, which is not uncommon for higher-price hotels. In the business center, the charge for using a computer was $6.95 for each 15 minutes, an impressive $27.80 an hour.

On my bill at checkout, in addition to the basic nightly room rate of $260 and $27.50 in taxes, there was a daily charge of $5.20 listed as SD TMD Assessment. The city treasurer’s office describes that as a fee “to promote events and tourism in San Diego” that is levied specifically on hotels, which have the option of passing it on.

Incidentally, when I checked out a day earlier than originally planned, I was told the “early departure fee” was $75. I protested, and the front-desk clerk checked with a manager and dropped that charge “as a one-time courtesy.”

It’s important to note, by the way, that many hotel brands favored by business travelers are not in the fee-adding game. Across the industry, midlevel hotels with strong bases in business travel provide a range of services without any extra charge — from free Internet and business-center access to free breakfasts and in some cases even a free evening cocktail hour with snacks. I will enthusiastically stay when it’s feasible at one of these brands, whether a Hampton Inn or Garden Inn, a Country Inns and Suites, a Marriott Residence — to name just a few in that market niche.

The convention and meetings industry will account for a hefty $117 billion of the estimated overall $273.3 billion being spent this year on business travel in the United States, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Meetings are planned years in advance, and corporate event planners are negotiating future deals with hotels that have gained a lot more bargaining power as the hotel industry revives.

That means corporate planners need better data to negotiate on things like group rates, Wi-Fi and bandwidth capacity in rooms and meeting spaces, and other charges. “Hotels now are in the driver’s seat because there is more demand than supply” for some group events, said Kevin Iwamoto, the vice president for industry strategy business solutions at Active Network, a company that provides data management and cost-control technology for companies in the meetings industry.

The meetings and convention business is also growing internationally, as part of the estimated $1.12 trillion that will be spent globally on business travel this year, an increase of 5.4 percent over 2012, according to the trade group.

While some international travelers already encounter energy surcharges and other fees in some smaller hotels, the powerhouse hotel chains based in North America and rapidly expanding abroad are exporting the fee mentality, said Mr. Hanson of the Tisch center. “Some resort fees are becoming common worldwide, often because the North American brands take those practices globally,” he said.

Adding fees is “still more of a U.S. phenomenon than it is globally, but it’s catching on in the major gateway cities where North American brands have been transmitting these practices,” he added.

On the Road: Fight for Hotel Bed Supremacy Spreads to the Skies

I’ve deliberately deployed ridiculously martial language there only to underscore a point about hotel bedding, which had been a mundane and boring business among old-line mattress makers until 1999, when Westin Hotels introduced a new mattress and bedding accessories branded as the Heavenly Bed, which was developed by Simmons, the big mattress manufacturer.

Whereupon a couple of remarkable things happened that truly did constitute a big pillow fight, or even a marketing war. First, seeing the overnight (sorry) success of the Heavenly Bed, other hotel companies rushed to develop their own branded high-end bedding, whether made by Simmons or by competitors like Serta or Sealy, which markets hotel-branded bedding through its Global Hospitality Collection, and others.

As hotel companies began buying luxury beds for their properties and also selling them through their own catalogs and online sites, the overall retail bedding industry underwent a revolution. Travelers, and especially a new wave of female business travelers after 1999, came home and decided that their own beds simply didn’t measure up to the ones they were finding in hotels.

After the Heavenly Bed introduction, hotels in every top category “understood that they couldn’t have a bed in the room that was crummier than the one the customer had at home,” said Steve Tipton, the vice president of Simmons Hospitality, the mattress company’s hotel unit. At the same time, hotel-branded mattresses started to be sold in retail outlets like department stores, and high-end mattresses and other bedding in general had become such a market standard that overall sales soared, to about $6.8 billion last year.

“The consumer connection between the bed and the hotel is a big deal” in the overall mattress business, Mr. Tipton said.

By 2006, when one hotel company, Hilton, had already invested $1 billion in new bedding since 1999, the hotel mattress race subsided. But now it’s back on. As hotels recover from the recession and begin aggressively investing again in improvements, Simmons recently introduced a line of hotel bedding called Recharge Beautyrest, positioned to sell upgraded bedding featuring foams that regulate mattress temperature. And even some airlines are now heralding the virtues of high-end mattresses and bedding in international first-class and business-class cabins, where lie-flat beds have become the industry standard.

For example, Delta Air Lines recently began promoting a new “Westin Heavenly In-Flight bedding product” for its BusinessElite cabins on international flights and on domestic flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as between Atlanta and Honolulu. Singapore Airlines advertises private suites featuring luxurious double beds in first-class cabins of its A380s, and Lufthansa Technik, the maintenance and upgrade unit of the big German airline, is marketing its own Flexidreamer bed (“for a heavenly sleep”), first developed for luxury private jets and now available for first-class cabins on commercial airplanes.

While such sumptuous comforts are most definitely not available in the airlines’ increasingly cramped and austere coach cabins, the evolution of luxury bedding into premium cabins on commercial planes reflects what the hotel business learned well over the last 23 years. As Delta’s announcement of the new high-end bedding for its BusinessElite cabins put it, “In recent surveys, customers have told us that the most important part of the in-flight experience is sleep.”

In the hotel business, a good night’s sleep on high-quality bedding is increasingly a top marketing point. For example, Crowne Plaza hotels, a brand of the IHG hotel group, is emphasizing bedding improvements as part of its multiyear initiative to refurbish quality standards at its hotels in nearly 60 countries.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting aspects of the whole hotel bed-wars phenomenon to me has been the impact on the home-bedding market. For most people, buying a home mattress was always an unpleasant chore, “right up there with used cars,” said Mr. Tipton at Simmons.

But starting with the Heavenly Bed, and on through other high-end mattresses that entered the market from various manufacturers, hotels in effect became real-time showrooms for mattresses. No more plopping down uneasily on a mattress at a department store in a futile attempt to try it out. At a hotel, you use the mattress the way you’d use one at home. Then you can purchase that bedding from the hotel company, or from a retail store that sells lines of mattresses branded with whichever hotel they are found in.

“It really takes a lot of the unpleasantness out of trying a mattress out,” Mr. Tipton said.

On the Road: Hotel Industry Deals With Its Online Critics

Now there are scores of major online travel and social media sites sprouting hundreds of thousands of customer reviews. And the hotel industry is frantically trying to stay on top of the commotion.

What appeared to be one such effort by a hotel executive drew attention last week. Tnooz.com, a site that specializes in travel technology, reported that an executive based in Sydney, Australia, with the worldwide hotel chain Accor, had anonymously posted more than 100 reviews on TripAdvisor.com, the consumer travel site that features millions of customer reviews of travel services, including hotels around the world.

The reviews of various Accor hotels were positive. A few took shots at competing hotels. Tnooz said that the executive, Peter Hook, admitted posting the reviews in a statement in which he explained that most of his reviews were for tourism activities and restaurants rather than just hotels. I could not reach Mr. Hook for comment.

Accor hotels around the world include the brands Sofitel, Novotel, Pullman, Mercure and Ibis. Kerrie Hannaford, an Accor spokeswoman, told me Friday she was unaware of the controversy involving the anonymous reviews. She did not respond to further calls for comment.

Knowing how busy most hotel managers are, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the pressures they have come under in recent years because of the tsunami of online reviews. Many hotel companies expect managers to respond personally to negative reviews, a time-consuming chore.

Olery, a company that offers brand reputation management for hotels, said in a report that about 78 percent of travelers used online reviews to help decide which hotel to book.

As the importance of online customer evaluations grows, an increasing number of hotel reviews are suspect. Big travel review sites like TripAdvisor say they try to monitor reviews to weed out the ones from customers clearly acting in bad faith, or from competitors simply out to torpedo a rival.

One global hotel company, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, not long ago created its own review system open to members of its loyalty program, called The Club. It allows review privileges only to members who have had more than one stay at a given hotel. Still, the reviews are open to honest evaluation, including criticism, said Paul Kerr, chief executive of Small Luxury Hotels, which represents more than 520 boutique luxury hotels in about 70 countries around the world.

Members overwhelmingly say that reviews are an important consideration in booking a hotel, he said. But for his group’s hotels, which do about 25 percent of their trade in business travel, it is important to cull the rampaging herd, he added.

“I didn’t believe that TripAdvisor provides a necessarily very good indicator of quality for high-end hotels because some of the people writing reviews may have only been to a luxury hotel once or twice, and don’t really know what they are talking about,” he said.

That can cut both ways, because an uninformed rave has minimal value to a discerning customer. “Someone might say, ‘Oooh, it’s so great; they have these fluffy towels’ — but that’s the sort of thing you expect in a luxury hotel,” he said. “On the other hand, you can get some unfair and unfounded criticism from people who don’t understand what a luxury hotel is about.”

He added: “We have about 450 reviews at about 250 of our hotels now. The customers love it. The hotels don’t. Some hotels don’t understand that it’s so important to have these reviews because it increases your rankings in Google. Your search-engine utilization is much better when it’s honest and transparent.”

I compared online reviews, chosen at random from the TripAdvisor and Small Luxury Hotels Web sites, for two of the group’s high-end hotels, the Huntington in San Francisco and Le Pavillon de la Reine in Paris.

Both hotels got mostly rave reviews, many using the word “superb.” The few criticisms were similar, but different in tone.

A review of the Huntington on the group’s Web site said, “I didn’t enjoy that Wi-Fi was charged ... really? Also, I thought the room could have used fresh paint, and the furniture looked a bit tired.” On TripAdvisor, an otherwise favorable review of Pavillon said, “Our room was in need of a thorough update.” It added, “The bathroom makeup mirror was held to the stem by duct tape.”

Mr. Kerr said that there was genuine value in providing reliable reviews, including those with criticism, for discerning and knowledgeable customers — even on a Web site managed by an organization that represents hotels, not the general public. “Our customers are not stupid people at all. They know what it’s all about,” he said.

On the other hand, he added, there is a desire for perspective. “If a hotel has only one review and it’s not a great one, that’s really not fair to that hotel,” he said. “So to make sure there are balanced reviews, we’ve got to have at least five reviews of a hotel before we put it all up on the system.”