Dealing with Hotel Overbooking. Kind of.

guest post by Sherry Gray

You plan and save for your perfect vacation, pack, get on a plane and arrive at your destination…only to find there’s no room at the inn. The hotel room you booked months in advance is not waiting for you and now you’re in a strange city with your luggage at your feet and nowhere for your family to sleep. Sounds like a nightmare…and it happens more often than you might imagine.

The good news is that the hotel doesn’t want bad press, so the management will do everything it can to help you find a room elsewhere.

The bad news is that elsewhere might not meet your needs or desires. This is especially true if you had not planned to rent a car and no hotels have available rooms within walking distance of your intended destination. If special arrangements have to be made, ask the hotel to pick up the tab. You can also pressure them to upgrade your room for free. Don’t give up, just stand your ground until they cough up a solution. Hey, you never know. Maybe there are no rooms in the entire city, but the presidential suite is available. It could happen.

Hotels overbook because rooms are like a perishable commodity. If the day goes by and the guest doesn’t show, the sale opportunity is lost and they can’t get that revenue back. If they book two guests for the same room and only one shows, they get to keep the no-show reservation fee as a bonus, so they make extra money on that room for the night. If two guests show up for the same room, they still get the room money…and in most cases they just have to make a few phone calls to find a room at another hotel. Most of the time, overbooking is a winning situation for them. Occasionally, problems arise and they wind up paying a little compensation, but most guests who have to be moved are too confused, anxious and angry to press for inconvenience perks, so they break even.

Stuff happens, and in some cases you’ll be bumped from your room no matter what you do. But there are a few things you can do to ensure that you’re not one of the travelers who gets booted.

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Choice Hotels iPhone App

I am in a mixed marriage — I like to plan and he doesn’t. Depending on the trip, sometimes we do it my way. And sometimes we do it wrong.

Wrong means we don’t make hotel reservations in advance, hoping to find a deal, a hidden gem, an exciting and hopefully clean adventure.

More than once on the “wrong” trips, we’ve been caught cruising down the freeway in the dark, looking for the rescue lights of a Motel 6 or Comfort Inn on the side of the road.

If you do this kind of thing, then you know the next chapter. After 25, then 35, then 50 miles of dark freeway, suffering through low-blood sugar fights and the compelling need for a ladies room, you spy a hotel motel kind of scary lodging-type building on the horizon.

You tell yourself that horror movies in out-of-the way hotels are fiction, just silly make-believe. You check in, strip the bedspread off the bed and spend a twitchy night hoping you don’t feel bed bugs.

The worst part is that the next morning you drive two more miles down the road and find a cornucopia of real hotels — with ice machines, coffee makers and soap — from which to choose. If only there was a way to find these places when you’re on the go!

Thank you iPhone, now there is.

Choice Hotels, the lovely people behind reliable no-frills names like Comfort Inn, Quality Inn, Econo Lodge and more, have a new, free iPhone app that lets you:

• Search hotels and make reservations
• View and change reservations
• Contact customer support
• Quickly locate hotels closest to your location
• GPS mapping from you to your hotel
• View photos of hotels

Needless to say, I immediately downloaded it to my iPhone. I’ll never have to stay at another Serial Killer Lodge again! Get your own at the Apple site App Store.

Image: iPhone App Store