If you travel a lot, you may have some experience with the term “walking”. Walking a guest means that the hotel is over-sold, like many airlines do, and needs to re-accommodate some of the guests. In general, a hotel will not move someone who has already checked in, although it does happen. They will opt to move people who have not yet arrived and are staying over the dates that the hotel is full. When a guest arrives at the property, the hotel walks them to another property, hence the terminology.

When you book your room, this clause is usually in the fine print, allowing the hotel to substitute a property of “like-kind.” Group contracts also include this and allow flexibility in the event the hotel runs out of rooms, has a natural disaster, a major maintenance issue, etc.

When, not if, it happens, the hotel covers the cost of the new property and tries to put the guest in an equal or better room. If this happens to you, I recommend going with the flow. Chances are, you’ll get an upgrade, and if they have to walk multiple guests, being the most easy-going person they deal with that day is going to be advantageous. You can even slip in a few additional requests, like breakfast vouchers or free parking, as long as they’re reasonable and you’re polite.

However, walking doesn’t always happen to a few guests. Walking can happen to large groups. In fact, if a hotel is going to have to walk a bunch of rooms, it’s in their favor to walk a group. Groups always have an intermediary between the hotel and the guests, giving the hotel some added buffer between the bad news and the angry traveler.

Walking is just a truth of the industry and something that is bound to happy to anyone working in tourism. I’ve had groups walked several times, and once, fortunately, only once, I had to walk a group. The latter of which sucks WAY more to have to do and the one time I’ve done it, I added to the problem with a rookie mistake. Here’s how these situations went down:

The Upgrade

I received a call first thing in the morning, two days before a group was set to check in. I had a couple of pre-days, one of which was arriving that afternoon. The vice president of sales introduced himself and then cut to the chase: the hotel’s newly renovated building had failed its occupancy inspection, and they were moving my block of 15 rooms.

At first, I was quite angry. There was not a lot of time to contact guests, find a new property, reschedule airport transfers, reschedule excursion transportation, etc. I tried to suggest ways they could keep my block at the resort since it was pretty small, but after some brief back and forth, it occurred to me that this guy was having a WAAAAAAY worse day than me, and I changed my tune. Their failed building was 170+ rooms, and they were having to walk nearly 130 of them, including three groups and over 40 individual reservations. Not only were they doing everything they could to fix it, they offered me several upgraded properties to choose from, including one I’d used many times and was familiar with, were agreeing to pay the cost difference in my airport transfers since the new property was further away and were extremely fast to get me in contact with the new property. They were doing it right.

By the afternoon, the entire group had been contacted, email notifications had been sent out, return rooming lists had been provided, and all the right people were in contact with all the other right people. Most of the guests were excited about the new property, as it was beach-front whereas the original property was not. The host who’d contacted all the guests was a great salesperson and was able to spin everything in a positive light. It also helped that we’d already implemented all the solutions before the guests ever knew there was a problem.

It was the best possible outcome for a bad situation, and I was very happy with both hotels involved and my co-workers who assisted in contacting guests and making new arrangements. It could not have gone smoother. I can only hope future walks will be even half as smooth as this one was.

Operation Shit Show

Operation Shit Show is what my co-workers and I affectionately call this destination concert trip. Several artists were going to perform in Mexico, and hopefully, their fan base from the US would travel to Mexico to see them play.

There were two huge problems with this trip:
Problem 1: The bands weren’t really well known enough to justify a 200+ room block in Mexico.
Problem 2: We were not controlling the entirety of the trip. We were just selling it and executing it. As a DMC, you tend to prefer to be in control, especially if you’re expected to execute the trip. If someone else has built the trip, you are missing key information that inhibits your ability to provide the package.

The trip started with 200+ rooms, which we told the organizer was too many, but we weren’t at risk for them, so we didn’t care. We put the package online, and it began to sell. We were selling it directly through our website and through another client of ours, and overall, it sold quite a few rooms. In the end, we had 55 rooms sold to one client and another 11 sold directly through our website, as well as 14 staff and band rooms.

However, a lot of these sales happened in the last few weeks of the trip being on sale. We had been reporting the sales figures back to the organizers every week for months, but at the last minute, the sales jumped up. It wasn’t until we provided a rooming list to the organizer that we learned they had been dropping rooms. We now needed 80 total rooms to accommodate everyone and only had 60. And, of course, the hotel was sold out.

Not only had they been dropping rooms, they had been dropping acts. The package had promised six different artists, and they were now down to two. They’d dropped artists as they realized they wouldn’t be able to pay everyone.

And as if this wasn’t bad enough, we also learned that the organizers didn’t have enough money to pay the original hotel, not to mention any new hotels to cover the additional 20 rooms we needed.

At this point, we could have walked away. They were in violation of their contract, and we could have refunded our guests and stepped out. But those 66 direct sales and the rooms sold through our client were our guests. They don’t know that the organizer is the one who fell apart, and frankly, they don’t care. They bought a package, and they expect to get it. If they don’t, they’ll blame the only entity they know of, regardless of who’s actually at fault.

Instead, we decided to fix it. We found four new artists, found other hotel rooms for staff and bands throughout the city, found a property nearby the original for the 11 direct sales rooms, and moved one room to a completely different city. All of this was paid for by our company rather than the organizers and cost well over $20,000.

It was in purchasing the additional 11 rooms for our direct sales clients where I made two catastrophic errors to add to all the other catastrophic errors.

  1. When I booked the rooms, I put each guest’s name on the room. This means that the ONLY person able to modify, cancel, or use those rooms was that guest. Even I couldn’t make changes to those rooms. Unless a client has paid you directly for a specific room, it’s much safer to book a room under your name, your colleague’s name, your friend’s name, your cat’s name, etc. Because the hotel knew I wasn’t the guest assigned to that room, they wouldn’t let me modify it in any way.
  2. I also put each guest’s email address on the room. This meant that as soon as I booked it, that guest received an email from our booking system to tell them they had been booked at this hotel. There is a tactful way to walk a guest…. This… this is not it.

In the end, we managed to make most of the guests happy, but there were several we could never win over, and the trip was the most difficult trip any of our staff had ever worked.

We wound up loosing thousands of dollars on the trip, mostly in hiring bands to make sure the list of acts remained at the original promised number, and had at least four rooms (maybe five? I honestly don’t know) sit empty despite having been paid for.

Our staff has never worked harder than they did on that trip, and behind the scenes, it was a nightmare. But, the guests were happy. We were able to solve most issues, deal with any minor complaints, and provide a great trip to those who had purchased it, and that’s really all that matters.

There’s often a lot going on behind the scenes, and it’s usually not as smooth as it appears. We always try to hide as much from you as we can, but every now and then, letting you know we’ve messed up is unavoidable.

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