Phish is performing at a massive festival in Delaware. Hotels are just canceling reservations to re-sell the rooms for more.
A year ago rumors began that Phish was launching a festival in Dover, Delaware. People booked hotel rooms for August 15 – 18 in advance of 45,000 fans swarming the town.
That got them regular rates on rooms. These aren’t mistake rates. They paid what a hotel normally cost.
To hotels, though, it was a lost opportunity and regret. The fans knew what hotels didn’t – that these would be dates with high demand, and people would be willing to pay more. So the hotels have been cancelling on fans, and doing it at the last minute.
The Wyndham Garden Dover hotel was cancelling rooms – that had been booked for a year- on Sunday morning, just days before the event.
Some guests received messages that they had cancelled the bookings themselvesOthers were told their ‘payment’ hadn’t gone through, even for non-prepaid roomsStill others were just told the hotel was overbooked and wouldn’t honor their reservation
Complaining customers were told to write in, and the hotel ignored the messages. Some who did manage to speak to someone were told that the hotel had bookings they needed to honor for Air Force guests (that they somehow didn’t know about earlier). Meanwhile hotels were charging three times more than usual. Those bookings, apparently, were being honored.
Wyndham corporate directed guests back to the hotel. People sometimes mistakenly assume they’re a customer of the chain.
Hotel owners are the customersGuests are the product.
Hotel owners sometimes refer to loyalty members as “leads” as in sales leads, or prospects to market rooms to.
This is hardly unusual. Hotels cancel guest reservations when they can sell rooms for more all the time, like during the NFL draft or a solar eclipse or a big college graduation.
Sometimes the hotel just resells rooms and is honest about what they’ve done. That’s happened to me more than once (a Westin and an Alila). Here’s how to avoid getting walked when a hotel is oversold.