Originally Posted by
freeupgrade
Seasons Greetings....
While I sincerely appreciate your detailed answer, in the final analysis, the guest gets the short end of the stick.
I would respectfully disagree with your point re: "decrease in channels due to switch to Direct TV" - for years (way, way before Direct TV), the number of channels offered at a lot of full-service Marriotts has indeed been (imho) extremely limited.
One needs to look at this on a hotel-by-hotel basis.
At one time, a fair number of properties utilized the local cable provider for video content. Often that was 30 channels or more. Over the years and with the expansion of DirecTV, most of those hotels migrated from cable to satellite. At those properties, this led to fewer channels.
Most of the hotels that had a limited lineup prior to DirecTV relied on large dish (e.g., C-band) satellite programming, which was HLN, HBO, ESPN and not much more. At those properties, the switch to DirecTV led to more channels.