Originally Posted by
KRSW
Eh.. in my experience, these often are old hotels, sometimes very old, where the Residence Inn down the street provided a better experience. Most of the ones I've seen in the listings have some pretty low ratings. A couple of them were so bad that Marriott wiped out all of the reviews on their site and started over.
My experiences at The Luxury Collection, Autograph Collection, and Tribute Portfolio (with the exception of one Autograph Collection property) have all been excellent, and I would gladly return to any of them. (I realize
KRSW did not bring up The Luxury Collection when bringing up the other two, but I added it to establish that "collection brands" are not the same as "conversion brands.")
I don't care if a hotel is 1 week old or hundreds of years old. Being old is not bad. The part of the Hotel Palacio De Santa Paula, Autograph Collection in Seville, Spain where I stayed began as a 16th century monastery. Enjoyed the hotel, its location, its restaurant, the helpful staff, and the condition of everything.
Originally Posted by
KRSW
While it may add more keys (rooms) for the Marriott website to sell, and be able to pick up lower-end properties, they do risk damaging their brand with this.
If Marriott (or any other hotel company) allows hotels to do things that alienate or disgust guests, it's bad for the brand. But having brands across the price and category spectrum is not bad in and of itself. In fact, a bad Ritz-Carlton can probably do more damage than a bad Fairfield Inn.
I imagine that as properties are initially renovated and reflagged to the whatever brand Project Mid-T results in, they will be nice for a Midscale hotel. Marriott's challenge will be to make sure the franchisees maintain and operate the properties well.
Originally Posted by
KRSW
Looking at that link, they claim a Wyndham Garden Inn is on-par with Fairfield and Towneplace, which sounds crazy to me.
The chart shows categories based on hotel features. A poorly maintained, poorly operated Midscale hotel is still a Midscale hotel -- just a bad one.
Originally Posted by
KRSW
After the stay my parents had at the
Wyndham Garden Inn at DTW (despite me insisting they stay at the Westin), they'd never stay at ANY Wyndham property again, nor would/have I. The hotel was so bad, that even with it being provided free by Delta Airlines, some of the passengers chose to sleep in the lobby or head back to the airport because of how disgusting the hotel was. Perhaps other Wyndham Garden Inns are nice and serviceable, but after that experience, it's permanently turned our family off to ALL Wyndham properties since there's no brand standards or Wyndham doesn't enforce them.
Shame on this particular Wyndham Garden Inn. Shame on Wyndham for not deflagging the hotel.
But I'm not sure how this means Project Mid-T is bad for the Marriott brand.