writerguyfl

I don't see posting a different opinion based on over a decade's worth of experience working in hotels to be argumentative.

First, most after check-out charges are put through separately and not added to the room folio.

But as you note, it certainly is possible for hotels to accomplish this task. But, it requires having someone at the Front Desk check the room back in, wait for the charge to be posted, and check the room out again. That ties up two employees for X minutes. To me, that's a poor use of labor to provide a very minor benefit.

But, if you want all Hyatt hotels to offer this service you'd need to change the system to allow all employees to do this without intervention by the Front Desk. (And like any system change, it should have safeguards put in place to avoid human error.)

Doing this would cost money to change the property management system, third-party point-of-sale systems, and training thousands of people about the changes. That won't be happening because it is not common to charge anything after check-out.

TerryK

This. :-: It is a complicated change to accommodate a small number of customers and may not bring in additional revenue.

gengar

Well, you made it part of your point when you (incorrectly) speculated about how hotel POS systems work. But to address the greater point, every element of property synergy is a "hypothetical benefit". And the convenience always has risk - for example, on the thread topic of a meal from an affiliated restaurant being charged to a specific guest's folio, risks exist whether or not that guest is currently checked in to an arbitrary room or not. Of course the reality of the benefit has to be weighed against the risk, but again, it's baffling how some people seem to have so much trouble comprehending the equation in one but not the other.



I agree that posting opinions is not argumentative.

But I'd say posting an opinion that doesn't disagree with me and then claiming you do disagree with me is pretty argumentative.

BTW, there's no hotel POS I know of (including the one Hyatt properties typically use) that requires a guest to be checked-in to add charges to the folio.

JackE

That is one good reason. Another is when I bill clients for travel expenses, it is more convenient to have post-checkout expenses appear on my folio than deal with another receipt. That is especially true because the folio is available as a PDF download; a post-checkout charges isn't.

writerguyfl

All the ones I ever used or knew about did require the guest to be checked in in order to send a charge. If the guest is not checked in, the folio would have to be closed. Closed folios do not have available credit to accept charges.

In the end, I stand by my point that this will never happen because it's so rare.

gengar

But guests do not have to be checked-in to reopen folios. Half the discussion in this thread is impossible otherwise. Under Hyatt's PMS (Opera) this is very easily done with the "reinstate" function.


Yep, and it's for this reason that charging to the room from other revenue-generating entities at the same property is so commonplace (and in some cases, even possible at other properties under the same brand!), despite the fact that there are risks to doing so. Property synergy is incredibly important in creating/maintaining profitable properties. And in this case the situations really aren't that different - but for some reason people's perceptions of them seem to be.