Does anyone know what some of the brand standards are for each Starwood hotel chain? If not, I'd suggest to the Lurkers that they get permission to release some details, which could help us report the violators....
Some background: I stayed at a Holiday Inn earlier this month and asked if their rooms had hdtvs. The front desk manager responded: "As of November 2011, all Holiday Inn hotels that have the newer 'H' logo
are required to have high-def TVs in guest rooms." I was also told that
these hotels also had to meet a new--faster--internet speed requirement. Granted, while this didn't require the hotels to offer HD channels (presumably that will happen sometime in the future) on those TVs, I like to hook my laptop up to hdtvs to review PowerPoint presentations I'm going to give the next day. But these two features: hdtvs & fast internet are two of the most important things for me when I travel. Since there have been 25,000+ views of my other thread, regarding
horrible internet speeds at Starwood hotels, I guess I'm not alone.
If a 3 star chain like Holiday Inn can demand that their hotels meet standards like this, why on earth can't Starwood force their hotels to have some basic consistency? This year alone, I can think of three separate Four Points hotels & one Sheraton hotel that still don't have hdtvs--something that weighs on my hotel decisions. And I'd say that ~60% of the Starwood hotels I stayed in this year still have awful/unusable internet speeds.
I think the best thing Starwood could do would be let us know what some of the basic brand standards are, since the lower-end Four Points & Sheraton hotels (more than any other Starwood brand) seem to ruin the brand reputation for their respective chain. If I'm staying at a Hyatt Place, Courtyard or even Holiday Inn (with the new logo), I have a general idea what my experience will be like--each hotel is remarkably similar. Not so for Four Points, where there are some AWFUL (Kansas City airport comes to mind) hotels, ditto Sheraton (Newark airport).
While I recognize that many of us (myself included) sometimes complain on this board, I could see a thread like this really creating an opportunity for Starwood to get some honest feedback (& free reporting) on their standards! I've been an SPG Plat for 10 years, but it concerns me that Starwood's standards seem to have dropped precipitously in the past few years. Not at all hotels, nor even at most hotels, but all you need is a few hotels to ruin the brand. Let those of us who love Starwood help to maintain its quality!