Slashdot Mirror
Hotel Honors Accidental Website Price of 1 Cent
doug141 writes "The four-star Crowne Plaza near Venice mistakenly offered rooms for 1 cent on its website, leading customers to book 1,400 room nights. Surprisingly, the hotel has decided to honor the 1 cent reservations, which means a loss of $129,000 by the hotel. From the article:'The hotel first thought the offer was posted by a hacker, sales manager Fulvio Danesin said Friday. But it turned out to be human error at the Atlanta, Georgia, offices of Intercontinental Hotels Group, the hotel's mother company, he said. The offer was supposed to be for a two-night stay at half price. A night at the 151-room hotel normally costs between $128 and $214.'"
Well, the mistake part, anyway. I used to work for a company that loaded hotel information to pretty much everywhere from a central source (so they could change something once and have it active on all the old airline reservation systems, all the expedia/hotwire/etc sites, and their own) and it was pretty easy to slip up and type the wrong thing - or to enter a rate, but forget to hit the button that copies it to the rest of the week. Sometimes the hotel honors the rate (and in those cases I'm sure they passed the loss back to us when it was one of our agents) but quite often they would just tell the person that booked that it was an error and they couldn't honor it. I'm not sure how that went but I suspect that the people who argued enough eventually got to stay at the absurdly redcued rate. Of course IANAL, so I don't know if there's any legal equivalent of "Dude, come on, you KNEW that wasn't the correct rate."
I'm sure many of those people are going to need a hotel room again in the future. Guess which company they'll remember fondly. How much that means is hard to tell and differs from customer to customer. If I had to bet, I'd put money on the goodwill among those customers plus the positive press outweighing the cost of the mistake across the chain as a whole. That particular property might not make it back individually, but chains need to support the chain image. One or two bad chain experiences can cost the entire chain a person's business for life. Good ones don't carry as much weight over time, but it should help for a while at many of the chain's properties.
brilliant move by the owner
In addition to the good will, I suspect that the people who take advantage of this will also spend more than they otherwise would have on room service, liquor, and other extras, so the hotel will probably make up part of the loss that way.