Originally Posted by Hotel_junkie
I think even a rudimentary map would be useful...telling us which room is a corner room or which direction it faces. It could then be used to figure out how good a room we were assigned during the e-checkin process.
That's my problem now...I see room XX01 on the e-checkin screen...I have not clue how good that is.
It would also be useful to see which standard rooms are bigger. For example: at the HS Chicago the XX10 rooms are significantly bigger than the regular rooms (both the main room and bedroom have much more room). I didn't know this until I asked the front desk and got lucky that they had a XX10 room available. This would have been great knowledge to have before checkin.
Boy, that's a lot of trouble to go to when the eCheckin doesn't even tell you what rooms are REALLY available (see other threads for details).
All this tons of work would accomplish would be to tell you something about the limited number of rooms shows in eCheckin. But what you most likely really want is a room not on that list, that may actually be available, but the near-useless eCheckin doesn't tell you that.
HHonors already knows about requests like High Floor. eCheckin often refuses to show me high floor rooms, yet high floor rooms are always given to me upon arrival!
Spending a lot of effort adding features to eCheckin would only seem worth it to me if before that eCheckin itself became able to show me available rooms that I want the most. As long as it only shows me rooms I want the least (but better rooms are always given to me at physical check-in), what do I care which of those rooms is RELATIVELY better?
And as you said, you called the front desk and got a better room. Every thread I read about eCheckin relates the SAME EXPERIENCE. Everyone who calls, or waits until they get there, get a better room! So instead of wasting time trying come up with a roomguru (which seems pretty unlikely to happen), just call (if it matter that much to you*).
*In my experience, there's fairly little difference between HGI rooms, within any HGI or between HGIs. Sure, there are small differences, but those wouldn't show up on any roomguru done "on the cheap". (The way seatguru works is that a TINY FRACTION of the planes mentioned are reported on by a handful of people, and from that they EXTRAPOLATE to all the other planes of that type. When this extrapolation isn't completely valid, they sometimes have "errors" that persist for many months, like not knowing at first that there are muliple seating configurations of a given plane and displaying A seating configuration as if it's the ONLY one.)
Also: In my experience, even at hotels I stay at many times, I'm rarely put into the same room, and I'm usually preassigned the room (don't get to choose, unless I want a WORSE room). So I don't even bother making notes about particular rooms (only particular hotels) for my own purposes. If most people are like me, where are you even going to get the raw data about what each room like, if even most FTers don't compile data on it. Do you have some giant fund to start paying for people to report room-specific info about every one of their stays???