GUWonder

Hilton hotels formally did stop offering elite perks to Hilton elites booking through non-Hilton channels, but that wasn't a factor in my use of the Hilton CPH. My primary use for Schengen area airport hotels is ordinarily for one-night stays involving evening check-in and morning departures where hotel lounge access is of minimal or no relevance to me. But for others who use lounge access for cost reasons or convenience reasons, I can see why the Hilton is missed.

Even as someone who has remained a Hilton Gold/Diamond over 19+ years, I don't miss the Hilton CPH. And I miss it way less after the opening of the Quality View hotel at the Hyllie station in Malmo.

CPH-Flyer

Actually, Spire Elite does not qualify for lounge access as a general rule, for IHG you have to pay for lounge access if you want it. It does give some much more relaxed lounges though.

fassy

Honestly, don't know. I always end up in a fairly ok modernized room as Radisson Gold. Certainly not luxury, but I usually arrive 10-11pm and leave 5-6am. So, as long as it is quiet, clean.... works for me. As said, wouldn't stay here for more than that. But then for these very short overnights on work I'm kind of easy going and convenience wins, if I can avoid a taxi ride - I really hate taxis - or crossing the bridge in the morning, I rate that higher than a fancy room. (ok, if the Clarion Airport would be cheap enough, that would be a winner every time.... but it never is...)

Isn't that the case for all major hotel chains for years? At least they never credited stays or awarded points if booked through third-party websites. And I'm pretty sure I had my fair share of complaints with Radisson, Marriot and Starwood as well getting Elite benefits booked through our corp TA or booking.com before.

GUWonder

Marriott -- before its Starwood acquisition -- would provide at-hotel elite status benefits regardless of booking type. Hyatt used to be the same way too. Nordic Choice hotels still provides at-hotel elite status benefits regardless of booking type.

Personally, I prefer hotels that don't try to treat me as "you are your rate/rate type this time", as I find it to be a more civilized approach to customers and a sign of the service providers valuing customers as valuable customers overall. Fortunately, many Hilton hotels near Schengen zone airports often still provide me Gold/Diamond benefits regardless of booking type. Unfortunately, Hilton has been the leader in this trend of "you are your rate/rate type this time" approach to elite status benefits, and Hilton has also been the leader in gutting the value of hotel program points being redeemed for hotel reward nights). That was enough to get Hilton the Delta Air Lines treatment from me, but Hilton never managed to seize the service leadership spot that Delta Air Lines managed to do in an increasingly oligopollistic marketplace.

fassy

Well, true the Hilton program has been gutted to a point were I do not longer care. The only thing I like about Hilton is, as Gold (which I get through a EUR50/year Visa from DKB) I get free breakfast for two when traveling with my wife. In a lot places this is a significant enough benefit to make book a Hilton, Curio or even Conrad directly with them.

nacho

I think they may have changed that to get lounge access for Spires at Crowne plazas (maybe only in some regions). The one in CPH is extra generous - they took the extra miles to give Spire lounge access (previously Platinum) and the access is for both cash and point stays.

CPH-Flyer

It is certainly not a stated benefit anywhere. Is the lounge at the Copenhagen CP still that open air space on the 2nd or 3rd floor? Not the most inspiring lounge I have seen.

nacho

Have no idea if the lounge is still at the same place - here's the link to the FT thread: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/inte...merged-18.html

From the thread they still grant lounge access to Spire on both point and paid stays - again not required by IHG but they chose to reward their top tier members. Marriott is different - a hotel GM told me that corporate said they offered too much and they were told to cut back down to the standard offering.

FlyingMoose

The only reason they get away with this poor level of product and service is because their customers let them. The average Swede having no concept of service or price/value will not change that any time soon. It is a mystery to me how Swedes go abroad to good hotels with excellent service and then are capable of just dropping those standards when they get home. Or rather, pay a higher price for a worse product. This should set off an alarm with any sane person.

Not limited to the fact that in most locations outside of Stockholm there is a cartel of overpriced hotels with poor service, giving people little chance to vote with their wallet.

GUWonder

Being served abroad by non-Scandinavians seems way more acceptable to most Scandinavians than being served at home by fellow Scandinavians, so I’m not surprised when the demands for service “at home” are different than the demands for service “abroad”. I won’t go into a historical explanation for this bifurcated approach beyond saying that it’s rooted in the very experiences that led to the social welfare establishment and a historical preference for the royal family/central authority over local aristocracies and their hanger-ons even well into the 20th century.

Gothenburg and Malmo usually have at least 3-5 of the following hotel groups represented: Best Western, Radisson/Carlson/Rezidor, Elite, Nordic Choice, Scandic and then some independents. Most other cities in Sweden are so small as to not need a lot of hotels/hotel rooms most of the year. Sweden has how many cities with over 75,000 people? Denmark and Norway each has even fewer of those than Sweden. I don’t know how many cities you know in deer or moose/elk country in the US, but most US cities with less than 75k people probably don’t have more than 3-5 hotel brands represented either. And the service standards of hotels in most such sub-75k person US cities is really not all that special in my experience, except that US hotels in such places tend to think their guests are more likely to be criminals than Scandinavian hotels think to be the case for their guests. Although the move to cash-free hotels in Scandinavia may be considered to be a counter example.

ksu

Fourteen, if you use the size of the tätort (urban area), not the kommun.

If the cut-off is 73.000 the number is sixteen.

The equivalent number for Denmark is four (Esbjerg is just under, at 72.398)

The equivalent number for Norway is seven (do note that important cities such as Ĺlesund, Bodř and even Tromsř are not large enough to be included)

GUWonder

Gavle in Sweden was once upon a time reported as having had a population of around 75k IIRC while it had at least five major (regional or international) hotel brands present in it: Radisson/Carlson/Rezidor, Best Western, Scandic, Elite, First, and Nordic Choice. And some of those hotel brands have multiple properties in the city. That doesn’t speak to a lack of competition. Rather that extensive competition helps explain why the price difference between a given hotel’s rates during off-peak dates and its rates during peak dates are often so much more extremely different in Swedish cities of around this size (or smaller) than they are in US cities of the same size or smaller.

In my experience of staying in the SAS home countries, cities in Denmark seem to have fewer major international/regional hotel-branded hotels present than comparably-sized cities in Sweden and/or cities in Norway.

FlyingMoose

In the US in cities with less than 75k people the cost of those hotels is often very low because unlike Sweden the cost of labour drops when you leave the major cities, very drastically. Service getting worse as the price goes down is to be expected.

My point was that outside of the 2-3 main cities, even in close proximity to them, you'll have towns with nothing but bad expensive hotels and no natural competition that focuses on a better price/value proposition for the customer, let alone service. Not even in tier2 cities with major businesses. The lack of international chains is also concerning, staying at anything mentioned other than Radisson provides me with no earnings on a usable program and even then Radisson Rewards is by far the weakest program of any major international hotel chain.

GUWonder

Scandinavian hotels are mostly nothing special and indeed can appear overpriced. And they do tend to be weaker from a service perspective when there is a service failure. But I'm not sure they are way weaker and worse than what is the case in non-Scandinavian parts of Northern/Western Europe in general.

The costs I pay for big Scandinavian city brand hotels in smaller Swedish cities during off-peak times is lower and a lower proportion of peak time rates than what I pay for comparably sized US cities in deer/elk/moose country in the US at comparable periods. And the gap between off-peak rates and peak rates in those kind of US localities seems to be far narrower for me than they are in Sweden.

Swedish hotels' labor costs do tend to be more uniform nationally than they are nationally for US hotels, but labor costs probably aren't the major driver of room rates at most hotels in the US nor in Sweden even in cities that have a population at or around 75k people.

I personally find some of the Scandinavian brand hotel programs to be very useful for me, as I do have a frequent need to redeem for stays in the region anyway. And there is always the Best Western program too for redemption choices that cover a lot of territory.

budenholzer

Has anyone changed FFP after using the complimentary lounge access on SK? I would like to use Eurobonus to access one of the SK lounges, but don't want to credit points to SK, but instead to A3. Anyone changed FFPs after lounge visit?