Originally Posted by
Flying Lawyer
why should this send shudders? Off season traveller booking suites and using the facilities a hotel needs to provide anyhow are the guests a hotel is longing for. A suite sold off season with 50'percent discount is better than an empty suite. Starwood and Hilton understood this.
Hotels are perfectly free to dump suites at the rates of standard rooms. They can even throw in lounge access, breakfast, afternoon teas, cocktails, canapés and free mini-bars to attract the elusive prize of the off season traveller. But it's a marketing strategy that has yet to catch on.
IHG had a tough enough job persuading ICs to offer "universal" club access and other refinements to RAs. The quid pro quo was convincing the hotel owners and managers that RAs were contributing substantial revenue to the IC pool. The reaction of that hard-nosed crew to news that they'd be asked to provide the same high level facilities for a further twenty, thirty or more years to guests no longer satisfying any revenue requirements isn't hard to imagine.
I'm not suggesting that
all life-time RAs would behave in an opportunistic way, but human nature being what it is there'd likely be a significant subset out to maximise their programme benefits over a couple of decades.