The eastern seaboard has gotten slammed w/ storms & million are without power - including multiple hotels.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/30/us/ext...eat/index.html
I read
gleff's blog this morning (he's w/o power & was looking for a hotel to check into for the weekend). Excerpts:
"I rang up Hyatt — the nearby Arlington and Crystal City properties had no power.
I rang up Starwood, there was a 15 minute wait time to speak with an agent. Local landlines were down, we couldn’t get responses from some hotels to figure out whether they had power or not. The closest hotels, Westin Arlington and Le Meridien Arlington, were without power. The Sheraton Crystal City was down. Even the Westins in Reston and near Dulles were non-responsive. The Westin in Georgetown was fully booked.
I called back to Hyatt and while they thought that the Hyatt Reston might be without power (with landlines out this was difficult to confirm for certain), they had just managed to get through to the Hyatt Fair Lakes in Fairfax.
Shortly afterward I arrived at the Fair Lakes Hyatt and found that they did indeed have power and air conditioning. They were refrigerated and fully staffed. So they had food.
They didn’t have any internet, their reservation systems were down...Their system wouldn’t show open rooms or clean rooms, they couldn’t even pull up my reservation.
I gave them my confirmation number, I told them my room rate. They found a room, sent someone up to check that it was empty and clean, and let me in. They couldn’t create any keys.
Guest demands were extraordinary. And the hotel staff performed marvelously under pressure. They were ever pleasant and helpful. They did what they could with hobbled systems."
To the OP: I don't know that there's a 'norm' for "Force Majeure" events. I'd say wait to see if the points hit your account, & if they're enough, then be glad you were able to switch to a hotel that wasn't impacted by the storms & move on. And be glad you're not one of the ones who won't have their electricity back for weeks.
Cheers.