Chris Lam

Whether you travel for work or for fun, being able to hop on online at your hotel is almost second-nature. Hotel Chatter has released their 2013 report on Hotel WiFi. It lists the hotels that offer “free” and fee-based WiFi access. “Free” is in quotes because oftentimes the charge is embedded within the resort fee that many hotels charge these days. Granted I’m sure there are hotels who really do offer free WiFi for guests to use.

Hotel Chatter also posted a great infographic of the report, if that is more to your liking. Click on the image below to enlarge!

Bookmark the report and always have it on-hand for reference!

I’ll be heading out to Las Vegas tomorrow to attend the Social Media Strategies Summit (#SMSS) at the Mirage. Will you be attending?

I’m looking forward to the Legal track as my new job is stuck in a highly regulated industry. I’m also looking forward to a few marketing strategies and community engagement sessions.

The folks who are putting this on is GSMI and their Twitter handle is @gsmionline. Follow along as I tweet with #SMSS.

I’ve posted a write-up on the TBEX LA event on my personal blog. If you’re interested in what I run into… go here: http://ow.ly/4ieZs.

So you think that social media doesn’t work when you travel? Think again. Social media is a powerful tool to communicate directly to  hotel and receive relatively speedy responses.

Here’s my personal experience with the W Hotel/Starwood and their social media folks.

Back in October, the FTH and I traveled to the East Coast to visit family. Our first leg was New York City. We booked a room at the W Hotel on Lexington. As soon as we started to check-in, we had problems with this hotel. Namely, front-line service and attitude.

I tweeted directly to @starwoodbuzz about our situation. The images below show the public tweets that went back and forth. I DM’d Starwood about:

• Unmoving door people
  • When you see people struggling with luggage and a revolving door, I assume the natural thing for doorpeople to do is to help with the luggage OR the door
• Unfriendly front desk person helping us check-in
  • One of the biggest pet peeves of mine is when someone who is in hospitality does NOT greet you first.
• Housekeeping calling out in loud voices down the hall at 9AM
  • Granted, it’s 9AM; I should’ve already been up. But… I’m on vacation.
• Same front desk person (how luck are we?) who again did not greet FTH when my hotel key was demagnetized and we wanted to get  it fixed
  • An additional hotel staffer interrupted this transaction and started a conversation with the person who was helping us
  • What, you don’t believe in manners?

Starwood immediately DM’d me (twice) to address my situation. We had plans so we took off and figured they’d catch up to us. … and they did. Ashley, the Director of Welcome, at the W called and left a message on our room phone. We kept missing each other. By the time we actually connected over the phone, I had moved on to the second leg of our trip – Philly.

Once on the phone, I explained what had happened and that I wanted to see this “ticket” through. Ashley said she understood and was very cordial. (This is what good customer service is!) Even though I told her that I honestly wasn’t planning on ever staying at another W Hotel, she offered us 10,000 points to our SPG account. I don’t know what that amounts to, but it was still a nice gesture from a hotel staffer.

What do you think? Do you think Starwood/W Hotel did the right amount of guest service? Too much? Too little?

Sure, the front-line staff shouldn’t have treated us like we didn’t matter in the first place. That’s something they’ll have to deal with offline. ONLINE, however, I thought Starwood/W did a fine job responding and handling our problems. They were quick to respond and to act.

Overall – good job, @StarwoodBuzz.