ABC Traveler

(Mod. note: this discussion was split off from the newbie snark/flame-free thread -- Z.)

While I personally don't do this nor have the time for this tactic, but in principle as long as the price is paid in full, what's wrong with this?

Matt4200

If you can’t see the problem then there’s a problem.

Dr Jabadski

Sounds like #12 of the original Laws of The House of God :

"XII. If the radiology resident and the BMS (best medical student) both see a lesion on the chest X ray, there can be no lesion there."

Zorak

A bit of elaboration might be more compatible with the snark/flame-free newbie thread

Matt4200

1) Tons of people booking the lowest priced rooms takes them out of inventory for others.

2) It would dilute benefits at that property for others.

3) It’s fraud and against Hyatt’s T&C

4) Allowing others to check in for you could lead to a variety of other risks (room charges, damages, identity theft).

5) If things like this get abused then Hyatt is more likely to crack down on other things and have less overall promos/benefits.

I’m sure there’s several more reasons it’s a poor idea that others can elaborate on if they care to do so.

Zorak

If the implied question is "why would the hotel care about ghost stays" then

1. For this point it doesn't seem like it would matter whether the room is actually occupied?

2. Seems like the hotel's overhead (and benefits usage) actually goes down if the room is not occupied. EDIT: oh I realize belatedly you may have meant there's future benefit usage by people who might not otherwise might not have reached Glob w/o ghost stays

3. True, but circular, if the question is "why would they care"

4. Also true but this risk is borne by the customer

5. Seems mostly the same as 3 but with slippery slope/FUD thrown in

So this feels like 1-2 reasons padded out to 5

I am left wondering if

6. Maybe (I am speculating, no actual idea) there's a regulatory/legal reason in some jurisdictions where the property needs to make a good faith effort to verify that the name on the reservation is the same as the person who checks in (in case something happens etc)

P.S. don't mean to clog up the newbie thread with this, may split it out into a separate thread later... (EDIT: done)

Matt4200

I don’t feel “ghost stays” appropriately fit what I was speaking about.

My biggest issue was having someone else either independently or as a business checking you in since you (or someone) has to be physically present to check in.

For example - Let’s say I lived in Vegas and offered everyone here to check them in physically for weeklong stays at Rio for a fee of $50. It saves them time and airfare plus they get cheap EQN’s.

Would that be okay, frowned upon, or outright fraud?

luv2ctheworld

Ghost stays impact the hotel when it's done at scale.

A couple of rooms here and there won't be an issue. A cottage industry booking up inventory can impact the operations, including scheduling and resources.

Equally important is the incidentals that a hotel can reasonably expect guests to generate. Room service and other charges that they would have expected don't materialize.

Again, the issue is scalability. If a hotel operates at a certain occupancy level, they know from historical performance there should be an x amount of additional revenue from F&B and other incidentals. They may even staff up more if they see a large amount of rooms booked up and don't want to have an anticipated drop in service level.

I'm not privy to hotel operations, but in other industries where you expect a demand spike or additional load, you plan accordingly (bring in additional wait staff for the dinner rush, etc.).

chicagoflyer1976

It also impacts the loyalty program. Think of 60 nights to hit globalist as a sales quota. Companies plan their inventive budget around a certain % of people to achieve or exceed plan, and a certain % not too. If everyone achieves or over achieves, you have a cost problem. Same with Hyatt. If they have far more globalists than they plan for, they can’t deliver on the benefits. So getting status cheaply doesn’t work out well. What I don’t understand is people who rarely travel yet go to such great lengths to earn status that will hardly use. Save your money and buy what you want.

mecabq

True, but the last two posts (#8 and 9) refer to ghost stays as the T&C are currently stated. If Hyatt allowed ghost stays (which I am defining as booking and paying the going rate for a room, not using it at all, but obtaining all of the loyalty benefits as if you had stayed), then the room rates and other financial metrics for hotel operations and World of Hyatt would adjust to a new equilibrium. Hotels, like airlines, already adjust for no-shows; they would just model a few more of them. F&B revenue per "stay" would go down, but REVPAR would go up, all else equal.

I also don't see in principle why hotels are opposed to this. If they were smart, they could figure out how to sell the same room to multiple ghost stayers, a win-win. (I am not saying that it would be in a customer's interest to book a ghost stay, but let's just assume arguendo that some would.)

I suppose the main argument against them is that it defeats the whole purpose of a "loyalty" program. Then again, many posters on FlyerTalk lament that loyalty is dead and the only purpose of these programs is shorter-term revenue generation as opposed to building more abstract long-term reciprocal loyalty (which improves the bottom line in different ways).

Matt4200

What your defining as a ghost stay in actuality is a Mattress Run.

To me a Ghost Stay is when you never physically even go to the hotel, most of the time you’re not even in the same state as the hotel during the stay dates.

As stated above you’d basically hire a person to go check in for you if full mobile check in is unavailable to complete a ghost stay.

Then as another poster pointed out if this happened at a larger scale everyone would rush to do it, giving everyone Glob status and it would ruin hotels by giving out so many benefits to basically every guest.

Also with airlines what happens when they oversell and people show up? It ends up costing them significantly more.

For example - I was recently flying Southwest they oversold the flight by 4 seats. Compensation to go on the next flight went to $1,200 for 4 people. After they claimed it I asked one what they had paid they said only $120 for their flight. Meaning the airline not only had to re-accommodate them but had to pay each of them 10x what they paid, each.

Raffles

There seems to be a logic fail by many posters here.

If you could book a ghost stay then by default you do it at the cheapest Hyatt globally. You would have hotels which were full every day but with no real guests. The owner would quietly let all the staff go and continue taking 100 x $20 reservations per night.

This way does madness lay …..

notquiteaff

Well, a hotel interested in accommodating ghosts could perhaps create a whole new category of virtual rooms with limited features such as “no door” and let people book those as ghost stays.

Or Hyatt could just sell Globalist status for $1000 without any stay requirement and let the properties deal with delivering the benefits. To some degree they already do that via credit card spend qualifying nights.

Ultimately the value of the WoH program depends on some degree of exclusivity for at least the top level.

Matt4200

Last year this was Excalibur and they had hundreds of ghost stays a week. For whatever reason they decided to close that option around May. So it seems it was not worth it for them.

I’ve asked Hyatt about that and they said if you don’t actually “stay” the night then you shouldn’t get the EQN per the T&C.

If I’m not mistaken it takes about $140,000 US in spend on the WOH card to spend your way to Globalist.

Let’s say the average WOH card credit limit is $5,000. A person would have to fully use their entire credit limit on that card 28 times in 12 months to hit that mark.

I’ll concede there are probably some subset of people with $100,000 limits on their WOH card and it would be easier for them. Those are the people Hyatt wants though, if they have that limit then they’re typically high net worth individuals who will spend heavily with Hyatt.

Everyone else it would be exceedingly difficult to cycle their credit limit 28 times in a year on one card.

Also, those same high net worth individuals can just do a status match to Globalist. AA ConciergeKey level Members have a direct match to Globalist, 0 nights stayed required.

craigthemif

IMO it is FAR FAR FAR worse to have people earning status from credit card spend, which in the FT context is massive amounts of MS. The Facebook "award trading" threads are full of people with loads of 2026 GoH awards to trade away, which can only be obtained this early in 2024 from massive amounts of MS.

But guess what... credit cards are massively profitable for Hyatt. And the cost of the benefits is covered mostly, if not fully, by the hotels themselves. So it will unquestionably continue to be possible to earn elite night credits from credit card spend...

"Ghost stays" are a different version of the same thing, except people need to be very engaged with Hyatt to bother. Overall, still very positive for Hyatt. And although Hyatt may consider it to be a screw up in the future, the new Guest of Honor scheme is clearly designed to get non-Globalists more engaged and attracted to Hyatt - as a certain % of people tasting Globalist once or twice will make the effort to earn it for themselves.

So this thread - as many similar ones across the various hotel boards - boils down to people whining "The only valid elites are people like me, and everybody else should be banned". Which leads to an argument of "benefits will be diluted if there are too many elites". Hilton, however, provides a useful case study. Everybody (in the US) can be Diamond from a credit card if they want, benefits are indeed heavily diluted, yet people still rack up 60+ nights per year at Hiltons...