There was no fire last week at the Palmer House. The incident being referred to here was a freon leak, which caused the hotel to be cleared for approximately three hours in the afternoon:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/...s-spill14.html

The only referenced fire at the Palmer House, according to the WLS-TV website (where the OP got the news story), happened in August of 2005:

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?sec...ews&id=3339989

That said, I'm not sure that the freon leak (in and of itself) is enough for compensation, either. We don't know if the OP was one of the persons injured by it (though I'm going to presume that she was not injured), and there's no other mention of inconvenience other than "there was a fire" (which there really wasn't).

The upgrade issue, as mentioned in post 6, is another unrelated matter - one that I believe has even less merit with regard to compensation, as executive level upgrades are not a guaranteed benefit for Diamonds. If someone is going to base their stay satisfaction on non-guaranteed benefits, then I think they're going to be set up for dissatisfaction on quite a frequent basis.

Mike