Making Reservations
• You always have to pay for your room in advance when you reserve, not when you stay.
• If you reserve your room too far in advance, you’re going to pay full rack rate.
• If you reserve at just the right time—often in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning—you’ll get the best possible room rate.
• If you reserve with less than two weeks until your stay, you’re going to pay premium. Big time.
• If you don’t actually stay when you reserve, you can’t have your money back. But you can stay another time, IF: you stay within 1 year of your original reservation, you pay reservation change fees, AND you pay the difference between the room rate you reserved and the room rate when you actually stay. And yes, sometimes all the additional fees will cost more than just reserving another stay.
Room Rates
• Room rates are per-person. Except for infants, as long as they sleep on top of you.
• You can pay quadruple for a larger room where you’ll get free drinks and sometimes hot towels and they hang your coat up for you. Plus (as an added bonus!) you’ll be permitted to enter and leave your room before other guests.
• Normally priced rooms will give you enough space to sleep, and that’s it. You can make your own hot towels and hang your own coats, thank you.
Checking In and Arrival
• You can check in online and bypass the front desk; they’ll text you your room key, but you’ll need to stop by security on your way through the lobby.
• If the weather is bad, you might not be allowed to stay that night, and there will be no refunds (act of God, you know). But they’ll make it up to you tomorrow or the next night.
• You can select your own room. For an extra, nominal fee.
• You can also go to your room early, if you desire. Also for a nominal fee.
Your Luggage
• Most hotels charge you to put your luggage in the room’s closet.
• If you pay extra to have your luggage put in the closet, the hotel staff always brings your bag to your room for you. But sometimes they lose it on the way.
• International hotels allow you to put up to 1 bag in the closet without charge.
• Under no circumstances can you have chainsaws, explosives, or fireworks in your luggage, and if you joke about carrying chainsaws, explosives or fireworks in your luggage you’ll go to jail.
• As long as it’s small enough, you can place bags under your bed for free. Except in Spirit Hotels: there, if you bring a bag into your room at all, you’re gonna pay for it.
Your Room
• Rooms with windows are preferred by children and guests on vacation.
• Rooms with doors are preferred by people who stay in hotels a lot.
• Middle rooms suck and everyone hates them.
• After you get settled into your room, they’ll show you the safety features of the bed, chair, toilet, and window.
• There’s sometimes wifi (for an extra fee), but you can only use it a little while after you get to your room, and you must stop using it a little while before you leave. Streaming videos from Netflix or Hulu is prohibited.
• You can only use the bathroom at certain times when you’re not likely to fall down.
• For that matter, you’ll only be allowed to walk about your room at certain times lest you fall down.
• The bathrooms, well they’re generally icky and the toilets full of a mysterious blue liquid. Oh, and there are no showers, so you’ll have to take a spit-bath in the tiny little sink.
• In the nightstand you’ll find a complimentary hotel magazine, information about the building, a catalog of odd stuff you’d likely never buy under normal circumstances, and a barf bag.
In-Room Entertainment
• Sometimes—usually only during longer stays—there will be a TV in your room.
• The TV’s never have sound: you must bring your own headphones, or you can buy some from room service when they come around.
• More modern hotels will have a tiny little TV suspended over the bed inches from your face; older hotels will have a projector screen way on the other side of the room.
• You can swipe your credit card in the TV to pay for a fairly recent, mediocre movie that’s been edited for content so as not to offend other guests in nearby rooms who didn’t purchase the movie yet are watching over your shoulder.
• The hotel staff will interrupt your movie at the rare interesting moments to make an announcement over the PA.
In-Room Comfort
• Coffee, tea, soda, juices and water via room service are absolutely free. So are tiny little bags of peanuts, pretzels, or cookies.
• Beer and wine is available for purchase. Credit cards only, please.
• Your bed, while lumpy and marginally comfortable, doubles as a flotation device!
• You can have blankets and pillows, but you have to ask for them.
• People in adjacent rooms will randomly jostle your bed and talk to you when you least desire conversation.
• Just as you’re going to sleep, the hotel staff will make another announcement encouraging you to join their guest rewards program or suggest you buy stuff from the catalog in your nightstand.
The Best Part of All
• When you wake up and check out, you’ll be in a totally different place than when you arrived!
