Originally Posted by
nacho
Back to Marriott LNF, I think Marriott is charging more for their rooms on Marriott.com than other chains. I can often find Hilton/IHG hotel cheaper than a Marriott. So this LNF is to get people who are price sensitive to stay at Marriott.com, I don't believe that Marriott is loosing money from doing that - each room they sell they get revenue - that's why you see a lot of Marriott properties using Priceline to fill up their empty rooms.
I've got some perspective on this because I mostly stay in the same area all the time, and thus repeat many of the same hotels a lot, and yet am on a budget and on my own dime, and can't afford most Marriott hotels at their Marriott.com rate most of the time, and yet only stay at hotels which are giving good promos when they're giving good promos (I belong to enough program to be able to just "follow the promos"). So only with LNF can Marriott (and their hotels) have me as a frequent guest.
Some seem to like it more than others.
One of them lets me get rooms at more than half off the marriott.com rate every time I try, even if that's weekly or twice a week. They occasionally
adjust the third-party rate that I use, but they never seem to completely take it away.
On the other hand, several other hotels in the area, the moment I use one of the third-party rates I find, (as soon as) the next day it's gone. It sounds like the Marriott LNF folks may be notifying the hotel what website and what rate was used for an LNF, and some hotels respond to that by going "oh, gosh, we didn't want that third-party rate out there!" and take it down quickly, while others go "that's fine, only a tiny fraction of our guests use this, and some of them are very faithful to us as a result, and so we don't mind as long as it doesn't run out of control".
In fact, could some of these be "mistake" rates that I'm finding for them? One was for a hotel which had rates $100ish, but one third-party site was showing a "1 King" rate for $75ish, and then a "King Room" rate for the same $100ish that marriott.com showed. (The hotel has only one type of 1-king-bed room, btw.) I did an LNF on the $75ish, and got a response a few hours later that it had been accepted. But the next morning, all those "1 King" rates for that hotel were gone from the third-party site, and only the normal-rate "King Room" rates remained. So were these intentional low rates that the hotel decided to pull after getting an LNF on them, or mistake rates, or was it just coincidence (and they had expired that morning)?