Originally Posted by
Nick Art
Yes... I thought that was normal. My parents did this for years. The agent I talked to was very apologetic about it.
Now guess who's having a fight on who'll earn the nights and points and therefore the status.
Obviously your name must have been on the reservation and your number in the reservation. You could have however added your friends to all your bookings in advance and they would have earned nights on them. Just keep in mind that on a two person room you can only have two ppl in it etc. It depends for how many ppl the room was reserved. Depending on the amount of ppl prices do change so I think it is fair.
Points wise I get it, but night and stay count wise, I mean I stayed at the hotel! I paid for the room. What else should I do? The program just regards it as if I have never set foot in that hotel and I find that a little bit annoying to say at least.
I would argue that whoever paid for the room should get the credit. If you paid, they should be your points and credits, not your friends'. Only one of you technically purchased something from the hotel.
As for a room rate being variable with the number of people in the room, I've not found that to be very much. On all of my Fairmont stays, I've never seen the room price jump when selecting 1 vs. 2 guests in the room. I did notice this past summer, when I stayed in a 2-bed suite, that on my initial searches, I was getting a base room price of $1,499/night, and when I eventually made the booking, the price did jump to $1,559/night because of the 2 additional people. And I think that was only because it was on a rate that happened to include daily breakfast for everyone. I couldn't argue with a straight face that for an additional $60/night, or 4% more, which really is only the cost of breakfast, that they should all be entitled to a stay credit in the program. If the room price for 2 people was 2x the price of having 1 person in the room (or somewhere remotely close to it), then I would totally buy that argument.
Now if was offered that double-dipping option by the hotel, as you apparently were in FPC, I would totally accept it too! I just never imagined that it could actually work that way, so I never asked or tried. We always used to put half of our stays in my name and half it my wife's name in order for us both to keep our status. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have them all recorded in my own name, if only to maintain a higher revenue history with each individual hotel, in case that makes a difference to their willingness to provide a good deal or upgrade on future stays.
In the end, is it going to matter to you that you didn't get the night/stay credit? If you're like me, as I expect many Fairmont regulars are, you're not qualifying for status based on nights... you're qualifying on points anyway.
Now that I think about it, I was the recipient of some double-crediting without even knowing about it at the time. Apparently, I was getting stay credit in the Swissotel Circle program on all of my Fairmont stays for years, in addition to FPC. I only noticed this one day, when I received a mailing about the benefits of my Swissotel status, which was rather puzzling since I don't stay at Swissotels, and then logged in to my account to check it out. In the end, it wasn't worth anything to me, as it's not like they provided free night certificates like FPC did, and one would actually have to go to a Swissotel to get anything out of it. But, it was interesting to see. I had signed up for the program before a stay at the Metropole in Geneva (which left the FRHI group the day the Accor deal took effect), and I guess ever since it was crediting to both programs based on a common last name, address and/or registered e-mail. You didn't need to provide your FPC number to Swissotel to get reciprocal benefits, as they matched it up in the background. I suppose that feature, which was intended to give you stay credit at a sister brand property, ended up accidentally giving the credit in both programs.