Some hotels are also offering cheap rates on rooms for local medical professionals who work long hours and want to self-isolate away from their families.

Unrelated to COVID-19, some hotels offer special local rate plans to encourage staycations etc. Usually the rate is available only to state residents or residents of neighboring states.(Show your driver's license to verify eligibility). I've also seen hunting rates for residents of the same and nearby states. (Show your hunting license; in some, hunting dogs can stay for free. It's unclear how this interacts with "no guns on premises" notices.)

I would never engage in an ad hoc program such as this. As someone else noted, OP is on the hook for any damage to the room and that has nothing to do with whether the guest is homeless.

The policies themselves are common, there are ways around them, and to be frank, if you have a reason, not that hard to obtain an exception without resorting to fraud as has been suggested upthread.

Rather, I would work with the property on a charitable effort which is not a one-off.

Are "no guns" notices common? I can't recall a firearms prohibition particularly in regions where hunting is popular. What I have seen at a motel in northern Michigan was a bucket of rags with a sign requesting guests not use bathroom towels and washcloths to clean their guns but to use the rags instead.

That is very kind-hearted of you. Really. But I have been burned 3x by homeless people I had helped out here in San Francisco. I have a tiny room off my basement with a half bath (no shower). Twice, the seemingly sober and well mannered gentlemen ended up having some sort of substance fueled screaming episode at 2am where neighbors called the police. The "guest" and uninvited guest were removed by the po-po.
The 3rd time I was robbed blind with over $2000 worth of tools taken.
Was I naive. Yes.
Sadly, several years later I have lost all sympathy to 99% of homeless. We are indoctrinated by the homeless advocates to give the impression that these folks were hard working, society contributing citizens up until yesterday. With a sad story that they were evicted and now overnight they have become scary, psycho drug addicts. Here in SF, they can receive more than $2500 per month in benefits by working the "homeless industrial complex" system. Non-profits have no idea if one of their "clients" is getting benefits at a myriad of other non-profits.
That said, the chronically homeless (hopeless addicts, brain damaged, violent, etc.) get kicked out of every shelter they ever go to. Many cities across the country ship them here to San Francisco with a free one way Greyhound Bus ticket. The mayor here is trying to negotiate with the empty hotels about housing them, but the hotels know that their rooms will be absolutely trashed and destroyed. Most of these folks should be in a psychiatric ward, not a Holiday Inn.
Please help the real people and families that have recently lost their jobs and incomes. Not the ones who have already been given 100 chances to get help and squandered all of them.

It's not fraudulent to show your passport as ID, assuming it's your real passport. I was under the impression OP is checking into the room but allowing someone else to stay. Yes, there is risk involved, but that should be nothing new to anyone who has ever checked into a hotel and heard the word "incidentals."

Like x1achilles I also live in San Francisco and even my most bleeding hearted acquaintance would not host or assume responsibility for the damages of a homeless person. Hand over a meal or donate to an organization, yes, but not take personal financial responsibility -- or you may find yourself homeless!

No local guests in hotels? For god's sake... where are people supposed to have affairs????? :)

I have read of the Marriott in RDU which Pilgrim #15 mentions. The city &or county govt.s have basically rented the entire hotel for early April thru early June to house the homeless & allow them to Shelter In Place. They are paying maybe $2 million for maybe 280 rooms for 90 nights, so about $80 per room night. The hotel gets cash to keep its staff employed & paid, and the homeless get off the streets. Hopefully, they can also get job assistance, drug rehab, etc. while there.
Also, the City of Toronto Canada has taken over several or many downtown hotels in a similar way, which incorporates Often1 #17's suggestion and could be supervised by police, social workers, etc. I would like to see something similar in many other places. Only drawback is, what happens when normaicy returns & it's time to send the homeless on their way?
To Davie355: I used my Honors points & Amex for the $50 incidentals deposit, but declared the names of the guests as I would my friends receiving a gift of my points. We showed up together at check-in.

We have nice people like OP but we also have people who sort of wants to make a blacklist: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/san-...otel-list.html

I don't know how I'd feel as I am not homeless, but would I want to stay in a nice hotel for a while and see how great life is then have to go back on the street. Or would it spur people on? Not sure.

You're not allowed out to have the affair. You have to stay inside with your nagging partner!

It seems to me that most all hotels in the US seems to have their doors open to the homeless .... as long as the homeless person isn’t perceived (by hotel staff) to be homeless, local or otherwise problematic.

To check into hotels across the US, I have used my US passports, passport cards, GE cards, and various other government-issued ID that are also without any residential address on them .... even at hotels where it would have been assumed that the guest arriving alone would have driven themselves there. I never had a problem because of that in the US. Not even when and where I would have been a local in ways at the time. Hotels often have a policy of accepting cash as a deposit for incidental charges from customers who for some reason can’t or don’t use a bank card of their own at check-in, but US hotels tend to view cash use as being more suspicious than card use .... even if the card use is a prepaid debit card or even a hotel gift card. And the more downmarket the hotel, the more suspicious the hotel may be if not using a bank card in the same name as the person whose ID may be examined.

I have seen such signs around MN and WI, states where even elementary school kids may have had a very early start to the school day due to going out deer hunting; states where shooting guns has often been part of the Scout camps; states where skeet shooting has been an option in way for some high school gym classes. UP MI may be a different story with such signs, but I don’t do much up there other than winter sports kind of stuff that keep me away from the same kind of places.

There is a difference between a government assuming control of an entire hotel to house the homeless versus some well-meaning do-gooder dropping a few off at a hotel and imposing them on everyone else who is staying there. If I'm paying the rate at a hotel I'm not inclined to tolerate homeless crack-addicts, heroin junkies and criminals in the pool, gym, breakfast buffet or other common areas just because some bleeding heart has a few extra hotel points.

I doubt that most homeless people are crack-addicts, heroin junkies or even dangerous criminals. And I strongly suspect that a lot of the newly homeless will be decent, normally hard-working people down on their luck or who otherwise have had a series of unfortunate setbacks in life for reasons that should prompt sympathy rather than maligning people with a broad brush. I will continue to think of homeless individuals as individuals deserving of the same respect that we all deserve.

I am more than willing and able to put up some homeless families in hotels using points, and I’m again going to do just that later this year because of the maligning that goes on against homeless people. Thank you for inspiring me to get back in the game of putting up homeless people in some of the same hotels where I’ve booked and stayed myself.

Take a walk down a street in any major city and look at the homeless. My description is far more accurate than yours.

If you are that concerned why not bring them into your own home instead of imposing them on others? [Redacted by mod]

Most homelessness is caused by poverty, not addiction. E.g. NYC has 100,000 homeless children. But they aren't visible as the kids go to school, the parent(s) work, and they live in shelters or temporary housing (e.g. a room with family). What you see on the street is only a small portion.