Hilton covid cutbacks permanent?!
 

Just read this article, not good news here guys, I can understand the elimination of daily housekeeping and mini bars but restaurants and possibly executive lounges......... hmmmmm. Not good!

https://onemileatatime.com/hilton-ho...uts-permanent/

This will push me more and more to use Airbnb. If the hotel isn't going to offer daily housekeeping or a restaurant, why would I stay there? What will differentiate a hotel from an Airbnb? Nothing. Therefore, why would pay I more to stay in a hotel that offers me nothing extra?

A lot of hotels have cut exec lounges out in the US and the few that are remaining aren't that great. I hope they keep them outside the US. I'd rather they do what Hyatt does and just offer a hot breakfast if there isn't a lounge to top teirs.

The NY Hilton cut out room serice long before covid and some other hotels stopped offer it pre covid.

I am surprised they would close bars and restaurants though, those have to be cash cows in convention and business hotels.

If they want to cut housekeeping they should do what Marriott and Caesars do and offer some kind of food credit or bonus points if you CHOSE to skip it and provide it daily for the guests that want it. I always opt out of housekeeping if there is some form of compensation like a food voucher. I'm sure the housekeepers will hate this as well since it will mean a cut in tips.

I am perfectly fine with no daily housekeeping, as long as I can get it on demand. If I am somewhere for a week, I don't need new sheets and towels every day. I certainly don't change sheets daily at home, and have figured out that if I hang my towel up, it is dry the next morning.

Lack of restaurant, lounge and meaningful breakfast will send me elsewhere.

These types of changes won't affect an individual housekeeper. Whoever is on the schedule for the day will still clean the same number of rooms.

What will change is the overall size of the housekeeping staff. (Here, I'm assuming the hotel doesn't do something sleazy like move full-timers to part-timers to avoid paying benefits.) If in a post-COVID environment the hotel only needs to 100 rooms/day and they used to clean 200 rooms/day, they will simply shrink the staff.

I had long been opting into the extra 500 points a day (varied by property) if you opted out of room cleaning. So the room not being cleaned, meh. But losing a free extra points, bummer. The real bummer for me will be losing the lounges - I always paid special attention to where I was booking to make sure the property had them and were open on weekends, etc.

Meh -

No daily housekeeping is a plus (except for the housekeeping staff that likely have lost jobs). Daily housekeeping is a waste.

No room service and no in room minibars is not a loss at all. They were just ways to waste money.

Lounges in the US are basically pointless anyway - last one I was in made people pay for drinks

So really the only thing in this I'm slightly bothered by is the potential of some in-hotel restaurants closing.

I think these executives are getting excited about a false prospect for going back to pre-COVID room rates with COVID-era levels of service. If business comes back then there's going to be competition and hotels will be forced to offer services commensurate with their rates.

That said, I could see some reductions, especially in daily housekeeping. But I'm tired of all of the disposable crap at all of these places - the level of waste is amazing.

Even if they are cleaning the same number of rooms tips can go down. I typically leave the tip in the room at the end of my stay and if I'm not getting daily service I am sure not going to leave as big of a tip.

The cuts may stick around for a while, but as the OMAAT article points out--it really depends on what the competition does.

I'm fine w/ cutting back on housekeeping to every 2-4 days or on demand. Half the time I find it more annoying tyring to time absence from the room to allow housekeeping to do their thing. I can't remember the last time I took anything from the minibar and room service is nice, but I could probably live without it.

Biggest issue for me would be cutbacks on EL and/or breakfast offerings.

Will be harder to justify the additional cost of a full service property if these cuts are permanent.

At this point in time no one really knows how this is going to play out but my guess is that the industry will never go back to what it was before the pandemic and all of the major players will use this to "right size" their costs going forward. i.e. permanently cut a lot of offerings that were lightly utilized or more labor intensive or move them to more of an airline model where your pre-pandemic (if not more) room rate will be just for the bed and that everything past that will carry various fees, surcharges and add ons.

Oh I suppose. Good ol Rona strikes again. So sick of it.

Note that very, very few guests tip already as it is. It's not like the average housekeeper is expecting tips or that tips are somehow consequential to their bottom lines. Maybe in large resorts it might matter but the bulk of all chain hotel properties are <125 room limited service properties and at those places tipping is almost non-existent.

It's interesting because for me I don't need breakfast, although taking it away is a reason to not bother with Hilton Gold status.

But I do expect daily housekeeping, as a luxury that comes with hotel visits. Otherwise, as someone else said, I might as well be in an Airbnb. I think the idea of offering points for housekeeping is a better compromise.

​​​​​