Originally Posted by
writerguyfl
For a wide variety of reasons, people check-out early without telling the hotel.
But that's not checking out early. That's leaving early and, assuming that the guest is paying for the 2nd night, why does it matter?
Of course, people accidentally leaving clothes in the room after departure happens almost every day.
Sure...people leave stuff behind after departure, but that's sort of a separate issue. I'm glad that most hotels at least have a process for gathering stuff and, when appropriate, reuniting stuff with owner.
Manager have to make judgment calls based on the available information. If I could only find a single change of clothes in a room, I would have made the same decision.
I get that at some point you have to make a judgment call - but shouldn't that call have been made on
Sunday, not Saturday? If you're in the room on Saturday, know the guest is booked there one more night with a credit card on file, see clothes in the room, how can you assume anything BUT the fact that he's going to be back for the 2nd night? If he's not, no big deal - the room is sold. Then you can deal with the clothes on Sunday.
Hotels do not do this to piss off guests; it's actually to avoid billing/credit card disputes.
I understand that too...in the context of automatically checking the guest out on Sunday, after the two nights are done, when you can't locate him and have made a judgment call that he's gone and not coming back.
It sounds to me like people made a mistake and thought he was only confirmed in the room for one night, not two. I would find it highly irregular to come back to my room and find myself auto-checked-out early simply because I was traveling light. In fact, I've entirely vacated rooms in the middle of a long hotel stay before...it never occurred to me to talk to the front desk about it in cases where I was in a large western hotel that had my credit card and my signature authorizing the terms of the total stay.