Braindrain, I can and might do exactly as you suggest....the delimna I am referring back to Lurker is I am trying to compare/contrast five or more prospective properties with respect to several criteria...and there is no good way to do this (let me say efficiently). Would your advice be to email each of these five properties ? I think you can see your suggestion doesn't scale very well.

I don't have the time to invest in this laborious effort *just* to screen a couple of properties on some deal-killer criteria, and the risks of going into making actual reservations and then stumbling across the "max persons in the room" issue sometime this spring, or, forbid it, after we get started into the trip, is obviously catastrophic. Since in the US the max capacity in room is not an issue (maybe in practice US hotels cap the occupancy, but Ive never had a problem w/ our five member family staying in a single room), I am surprised starwood doesn't make it more clear somewhere about this apparently iron-clad custom in Europe of capping occupants to as few as two, sometimes three, in the room. My suggestion now for over a year...spg should take the lead (among their peers, the Marriotts, Hiltons, and Hyatts) and provide a simple downloadablle spreadsheet for properties world-wide with scads of details and lesser-known information about each property. I don't disagree this info might not need to overwhelm a web site...but it ought to be available somewhere.

As it stands, starwood is close to losing 24-30 room nights from me at an international property because I am not sure I would be confident with whatever I learn without calling each and every property and taking copious notes, to include names, on what they tell me. Anyway...guess I'lll stand by for William to give me the official word on this issue of max cap per room for each of these properties and go with that (Sheraton Jagdhof, Goldener Hirsch, in Salzburg, and then all three starwood properties in Davos are the five I am wishing to compare/contrast). Issues such as distance from nearest ski slope, [absolute] info regarding max occupancy in rooms, ability to use starpoints to upgrade to a club level when staying on points, presence of club level to begin with, all are what I am trying to find out. Lacking a downloadable file approach, maybe spg's web site would offer a side-by-side comparison layout where a traveler could set up up to five properties in a linear fashion and compare/contrast them (eBay offers this innovative tool by offering an option to compare several auctions side-by-side; ditto for another favorite site of mine, http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/compare_select.php, where one can compare in a side-by-side format up to five cell phones - what a tool for managing the information overload of cell phone selection). William - get your web guys to offer such a tool and that would go a loooon way to making the spg.com web site more palatable. Otherwise, I fear the logistics of this effort are overwhelming before I even get started and the risks of making one error or oversight too catastrophic in nature to justify the effort to study and book them by going to each properties' web site one by one.