Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective by Peter Greenberg

Author:Peter Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363992
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Matt Damon

Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr. Ripley)

At some point between the time you call the hotel and about three weeks before the big game, the concierge is going to call you. The concierge will diplomatically ask whether you really need all eight tickets and all four rooms. Of course you don’t. So, using the concierge as the unofficial broker, you will release three rooms and sell six tickets at a huge profit. This will satisfy the concierge and make six other people very happy because they managed to get tickets. But you get to be the happiest of all, because the money you’ve made selling those six tickets that you didn’t want in the first place is enough to pay for your hotel room and the two tickets you originally needed.

A similar tactic can be used for getting hotel rooms during peak times when it seems that all city hotels are booked solid. Let’s say you need a hotel room so you can get to the Final Four college basketball championship. But all the hotels claim they are sold out or even oversold. Can you trust that claim? Not necessarily.

There’s a big difference between a booked room and a blocked room. For major annual events like this, large groups of rooms are held, or blocked, by advertisers, television networks, large corporate sponsors, and the event organizing committees. Concierges are a terrific resource in this situation because they know who controls those blocks. Inevitably, people block more rooms than they eventually need. In many cases, these rooms have also been prepaid. Concierges can help because they are in a position to contact the parties who control the blocks to see whether they might want to release some of their rooms. The hotel can’t release the room, but the block holder can—and often at an attractive price.

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