For the best deal, call the hotel directly: Melchiorri
You’d think a guy like Anthony Melchiorri, host of Travel Channel’s Hotel Impossible, would settle for nothing less than luxury hotels when he travels.
But Melchiorri, entering his seventh season as the fixer of failing hotels, says he’d just as soon stay in a roadside motel if it’s got good reviews online.
“Those are mom and pops that are working their butts off,” Melchiorri said in an interview with the Associated Press. “They live in the back of the hotel, they get up in the morning, they put out fresh flowers, they make you breakfast … I can’t wait to meet that owner. I can’t wait to have their breakfast. I can’t wait to sleep in that bed.”
Melchiorri, who has a new show called Extreme Hotels in the pipeline, offered advice for getting good hotel deals.
Booking
“When you go online, you have to be aware that all the ads on the side of the websites and all the ads on top, those are usually third parties. Say you put in the Algonquin New York. The Algonquin New York comes up but it says underneath the URL, Hotels.com. You have to be really savvy about making sure you find the website of the hotel. That sometimes could take you to the second or third or fourth page. … You book with a third party, it’s really difficult to get your money back. The hotel’s hands are tied.
“The hotel is guaranteed to have the lowest rate. Expedia is not allowed to have a lower rate than the hotel. When you go to the more opaque websites like Priceline and those, sometimes you can get a better deal. I hate to even say that. Those rates are hidden and sometimes the hotel will drop their rate last-minute, ridiculously low, just to fill up the rooms, but it’s always better to go to the hotels.”
Call the hotel
“Make a personal connection. … That gives that person at the hotel ownership of your reservation. … It costs a lot to get you to my hotel. Once you get there, I want to keep you as my guest.
“Ask for anything you want. You want flowers. You want an upgrade. You want to be by the pool. You want to be upstairs, downstairs, ask for everything. There are limits of what we can do. But it’s not whether we say no or yes. It’s how we say no. If we say no, that’s just a bad answer. If we say, ‘Unfortunately the upgrade is not available today, it’s available tomorrow if you want to change rooms,’ which most people don’t want to, at least you’re giving them an option. No one likes the word no. People do like explanations. If you’re explaining things to people, 99.9 per cent of the time, people are understanding.”
How to complain
“There’s three stages of complaint: polite complaint; direct aggressive complaint; third, go to the internet and blow the damn hotel up on the internet and tell them how bad they are. I am a very big proponent of giving hotels two chances to fix their problems. If they don’t, I am a huge proponent of going online and telling everybody in the world the hotel’s problems. … The training priorities, the passion has to be to take care of every single problem.”
Bedbugs
“I got my badge of honour in Europe a couple weeks ago. I finally got bit by bedbugs.”