jeanie

Several years ago, I stayed for 3 nights at the Courtyard Bogota Airport for a business trip.

Today, I got an invitation to connect on LinkedIn from someone I don't know. I'm in sales, so I typically check to see if the person is someone I might do business with in the future. The woman is from Bogota, Colombia, and the only thing I can see that we have in common is that she was a reservation agent at the Courtyard Bogota Airport from June, 2016 - July, 2017. That seems to be about the right time frame for the business trip I took to Bogota. I am a straight woman, and we didn't hook up or anything like that. I don't remember speaking to or meeting her at all.

This whole thing just strikes me as odd! Anyone else have a reservations or front desk agent contact you like this years later? If she kept my personal information from that stay, it's pretty creepy! BTW, I ignored the invitation.

northernstar84

Relax be happy and dont think too much. New contacts around the world are always good.

longtimereader firstimeposter

I think it's more of Linkedins creepy algorithms on who it suggests to connect with and the front desk agent accidentally clicking to connect with you or not understanding how Linkedin works. I've seen very random people in my suggestions that a former brief acquaintances that I've never had a professional relationship with. I've had two or three front desk people request to connect with me in the past from hotels I frequent. Kind of odd but whatever.

jwlowry

I have had hotel personnel attempt to connect with me on LinkedIn, but it is usually a manager or someone with whom I interacted a lot over the course of several stays. Never years later.

MSPeconomist

It's also a former employee of the hotel. This does raise the question of whether she took guest names and contact information with her when she quit or was fired.

jwlowry

Excellent point.

TXJeepGuy

This was my thought... not to mention if you link it to your email history it will try to connect with anyone you've ever sent an email to.

jeanie

I don't allow any of my social media accounts access to my contacts or email accounts. I also don't have any LinkedIn 1st or 2nd connections in common with the woman. I think she took customer information from the hotel when she left.

mctaste

There are few people I need to network with more than former hotel staff from Bogota. I vote click Accept and see what happens!

BenA

Many social networks have a tool that scrapes your e-mail contacts and "imports" them as invitations. The most likely explanation here is this agent e-mailed you a welcome message, as many hotels do for elites; this caused your contact information to be automatically saved in their address book by their e-mail application, and then when they signed up for LinkedIn that information was matched to your profile.

This obviously isn't a best practice, but it's not uncommon; I've even gotten macro viruses e-mailed from airlines in the past that I've corresponded with. For an emerging market hotel, I suspect more of the CRM is done manually than you might expect, and it's not hard to imagine an employee syncing a mobile device and then retaining that contact list when they left the position for their next role.

To avoid this sort of thing happening, I like to give my social networks alternate e-mail addresses and phone numbers so my profile can't be correlated directly back to my real world identity. But for someone in sales, I can certainly appreciate the need to appear more visible to your clients...

spgplat21

Was it a personal invitation or just a generic one? If it was generic this sounds much more like she activated some auto-connect feature from linkedin that searched through her emails for potential contacts. As others have noted, this generates some really odd invitations.

If she didn't write you a personal message, I would be surprised that she would steal customer information from the hotel just to send random linkedin invites to everyone.

jeanie

As I mentioned earlier, LinkedIn doesn't have access to my contacts or my email. So it would be impossible for that to happen. I am one of those people that sets strict privacy settings on my social media accounts. I don't want my business contacts to get spammed because my contacts got mined. It's not a good way to conduct business. LinkedIn frequently asks me to link my contacts with their site, and I never do.

The only way she could have gotten my email would have been to take it from my Marriott reservation. Since she no longer works there, any work email address she might have had should have been disabled years ago. And I don't email personal accounts for Marriott employees while staying at a hotel. BTW, I think this is really weird as well. That's why I posted about it.

daloosh

I would guess it's a weird linkedin algorithm, I get suggestions of people not in my immediate network often, and sometimes see people from five or ten years ago that I had a glancing passing knowledge of. I like the idea that she sent you a welcome email three years ago, and that email was used as a connection or a contact point.

arlflyer

It doesn’t make sense that someone stealing personal information would reach out directly to a victim - for what purpose? Most likely a bot, crawler, or some sort of algorithm using scraped data.

SHLTP

I am connected to a ton of hotel workers on LinkedIn. It is nice as I keep in touch with them - when we meet at same or different property it is like a reunion I saw someone last month that I hadn't seen since 2011 but we had been connected on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is for professional networking and hotel stays are part of that.

My guess this was a weird algorithm thing. I opened a Facebook account a few months ago. and my 7th grade crush popped up. I hadn't thought of her in 30 years, pre internet. it scared heck out of me how much they scrape