quinella66

It seems from looking at various hotel rooms on the website that often you will not see suites available for booking on the website. I wonder if you cannot book suites online for some hotels or if I was just unlucky to always pick one that was sold out. For example, I know that the Westin Maui has suites since I stayed in one, but I have never seen one come up on the website.

Any ideas?

Starwood Lurker

Most hotels choose not to sell suites online, but rather prefer to sell them in-house. Even if you call the Customer Contact Center, often suite availability cannot be found at any rate other than RACK. I suppose they have their reasons and it probably all lies within sales management and revenue management concerns.

Sincerely,


William R. Sanders
Customer Service Coordinator
Starwood Preferred Services

[email protected]

Kagehitokiri

Suites rarely show up. General reservations can see most, if not all. So you have to call general reservations.

Then, some of the rooms are not even listed to them, or are listed to them, but are still controlled completely by the hotel.

Annoying, but I've talked to them so much lately I'm used to it


Lurker, I would have to say based on my talking to general reservations a LOT lately, mostly about suites, they HAVE been able to give me, in these cases, ALL the information on available rates with suites.

So best available rates, rack rates, whether SPG50 applies, and the basic room details for every suite.

Wait, actually, as I say that, maybe they didn't have the information on the Wow and Extreme Wow Suites in New York (at Ws)... They DID have info on the Mega suites though..Which is right before those top 2.

Starwood Lurker

Yeah, like I said, if an associate puts the RACK rate into the rate search field, checks for a particular date, and the hotel has (some) suites attached to this rate plan, then they will be able to see all the suites the hotel wants to sell at RACK. There are also some details provided in each suite description when you look at the overall availability. But, you won't know if SPG50 or BAR applies to these suites unless you check those specific rate plans. My personal experience is that if a hotel has a lot of suites, then they will sell them online and there will be better availability at discount rates. If they only have a few, then they usually sell them at RACK or keep them for meetings/sales contracts. So, it just depends on the circumstances of an individual property, really.

Sincerely,


William R. Sanders
Customer Service Coordinator
Starwood Preferred Services

[email protected]

MarshKing

Great quesion! Here is my attempt to answer it...

NOTE: This is an overly simplistic example (and it looks like I am playing Connect Four or tic-tac-toe), but hopefully it will make sense.

I used to work at a Westin, and we had 4 "Resort Suites" at the property. They were not bookable online (or via the 800#, if I remember correctly).

To help explain why, take a look below at the 4 suites and their availability over a 4 day period. Pretend that the X's indicate that the suite is reserved for a given night, and O's indicate that the suite is available for a given night.

Suite 1 O X X X
Suite 2 X O X X
Suite 3 X X O X
Suite 4 X X X O

The important thing to note is that there is a suite available on each night, however NO suites are available for multiple nights. Now if someone went online to see if a suite was a available for all 4 nights, the website would indicate that one was available and would allow someone to book a suite for all 4 nights. Same thing would happen if someone at a reservation center took a call. Their computer would show that a suite was offered every night, and they would allow the caller to book it.

The problem becomes that someone would now have a reservation for a suite that the hotel does not actually have available for the entire length of the stay. The hotel can always shuffle room assignments around, but with only a few suites available to shuffle between, it becomes extremely difficult to balance everything out.

The rule for us at the hotel was to ALWAYS preblock a specific suite when someone reserved one. That way the guest would not be at risk of having to bounce between different rooms.

Thus, since individual properties are the ones who can actually assign a specific room number, suite reservations must be made through the individual property.

We did not preblock reservations for standard rooms since we had 400+ rooms, which were plenty to be able to play around with when a guest arrived. Only on days where we were sold out would we preblock regular rooms, and that was usually only done on the morning of.

Another lesson here is that although a website may show suites available after you check-in and are not upgraded, it does not mean that the front desk employee is a jerk who refused to obey the SPG rules. This is also why upgrades are easier on short stays. A "one night hole" for a suite is much easier to find than a "5 night gap" is.

Another disclaimer: I left this job 5 years ago, and technology may now help prevent these problems from happening, but this was the reasoning behind the lack of bookable suites online back then.

Kagehitokiri

Good info, thanks.

sc flier

I don't think that I've ever seen a suite listed online for the Westin Las Vegas -- even when searching months in advance for single nights. I've never gotten a suite upgrade there. The last time that I checked in for a one-night stay, the clerk admitted that they had vacant suites but that they were remaining vacant for the hotel owners that were arriving the next day.

quinella66

Thanks to all who answered, that about sums it up for me. I was wondering why I could not find any on-line.