Dodgers bump guests from Pfister Hotel
Darin Latimer of Chicago was in Milwaukee over the weekend when he got an unexpected call from a manager at the Pfister Hotel.
Latimer and his wife, Carolina Lopez, were staying Friday and Saturday night at the Pfister, a 125-year-old luxury hotel on the east side of downtown.
The hotel manager was pleading with them to give up their room and take a room at the downtown Marriott at the Pfister’s expense.
Turns out the Pfister was overbooked because it was under contract to house the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in town for the National League Championship Series against the Milwaukee Brewers.
The hotel manager was going down the guest list, one name at a time, asking people to give up their room in exchange for a free stay at the Marriott.
Latimer and Lopez had booked their stay on Hotels.com, for about $230 a night, to attend a Liz Phair concert at Turner Hall. The only room the Pfister had left Saturday was going for $743, plus tax, a night.
“I can’t blame them for trying,” Latimer said, but he and his wife decided to keep their reservation and not take two
free nights at the Marriott, only a few blocks away.
“When we get the opportunity to come to Milwaukee, I really like to stay at the Pfister. It’s a little more of an event,” Latimer said.
The Pfister is one of Milwaukee’s most luxurious — and expensive — hotels.
Other downtown Milwaukee hotels had rooms available Saturday from $199 to $400 a night, not unusual for a busy weekend. After accepting some guests from the Pfister, the Marriott was sold out.
Tim Smith, general manager at the Pfister, said it wasn’t unusual for the hotel to have a $743 per night suite and rooms priced at about $230 at the same time.
“Some of our presidential suites on the top floor can cost upwards of thousands of dollars a night regardless of whether it’s busy or not,” Smith said.
Still, he dreads having to call guests and ask if they would be willing to give up their room, even if it’s for a free stay somewhere else.
“But it comes with the territory,” Smith said, much like airlines ask people to give up their seat when a flight is overbooked.
“We methodically go through the list of people who are arriving, and we try to pick the people who maybe are here on a leisure trip and are spending out of their own pockets, rather than somebody else’s expense account.”
Usually, people take him up on the offer.
“I would say 95 percent of the time they’re fine with it. Rather than spending $500 for two nights, now they’re spending nothing, and they still get to come to Milwaukee for the weekend.”
If the Dodgers are back in town this weekend, the Pfister could be overbooked again.
“We sign contracts with the baseball teams, throughout the course of the regular season, that basically obligate us to take their team should they end up coming to Milwaukee to play the Brewers in the playoffs,” Smith said.
The Brewers vs. Dodgers matchup is a seven-game series that was tied 1-1 after two games at Miller Park and heading into three games at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles this week, starting Monday. If the Brewers win one or more of those games, the series will return to Milwaukee.
Latimer, a Chicago Cubs fan, said he wasn’t upset about being asked to give up his room at the Pfister.
“We had hoped the Cubs would be playing this game, but you guys took care of that,” he said.