Congratulations! You are in charge of making the hotel reservation for your team’s next trip, and the choices of hotels are endless, the variables to consider are massive, and the entire team will hate you if the stay is not perfect. I hope you are getting paid a lot for this job!

Just kidding! You are likely a volunteer undertaking this great task, and just hope to live to tell about this hotel booking experience when it’s over. To help, I have outlined some things you can do before, during and after your hotel stay, that will at least improve your chances of everything going well.

 

Making the Reservation

There is a litany of ways to make hotel reservations for your team – direct with a hotel, through a travel agent, through the tournament’s official housing service, or an OTA (Online Travel Agency) like Expedia.com, Travelocity.com, or a sports-oriented site like Hotels4Teams.com. No matter how you make it, make sure you are getting what you are asking for, particularly in terms of guaranteed roomtypes. If you are dealing with a hotel’s sales department or a housing service for your tournament, you should be able to specify the roomtype you want (generally double/doubles, meaning two double beds, or less commonly, two queen beds). But if you are booking online or with a hotel company’s toll free number, the roomtypes offered may be ROH (Run of House), meaning they can give you any roomtype that is available at check-in. Also beware of the reservation agent on the other end of the line, that when you ask for double/doubles, says “I will request that.” That means you may get that, or you may get kings.

Lastly, make sure you review the confirmation details for arrival and departure dates, number of rooms, and other details. One mistake customers and hotels make is when someone says “I need the rooms from the 17th to the 20th. Some people hear “Arrival on the 17th, Departure on the 20th.

Others hear Arrival on the 17th, staying through the 20th, Departing on the 21st. When you get your confirmation, review it, and make sure everyone is what you asked for.

 

Getting Hotel Confirmation Numbers

A hotel confirmation number is a unique number in a hotel’s reservation system that is connected to the name, roomtype and arrival/departure information for that individual. If a hotel issues you confirmation numbers for each room, you know the reservations are in place. If a hotel will not give you an actual confirmation number for each room, it suggests that they are overbooked on your arrival night, and the reservations are not yet in their system. It’s much like airline tickets, where you have the ticket; you are at the boarding gate with a boarding pass, but with no assigned seat number. The airline is waiting for cancellations or no-shows for your “seat” to become available. If you book rooms for your team direct with a hotel, and they do not give you a confirmation number for each room at least a week before arrival, then call your sales contact or the General Manager, and ask them what is going on.

In the case that you must book your rooms through a Housing Service to attend the tournament, take a look at the confirmation numbers they give you – they may be their number, not the hotel’s. Most professional housing services will first issue you their own in-house record number for the reservation, and then later, send you the actual confirmation number issued by the hotel. That is how we do it at my company, THS, and because our team customers show up at each hotel with a real hotel confirmation number, we rarely ever have issues at check-in. And that’s with us handling 350,000 roomnights of team reservations at 1,000+ hotels per year. The moral of the story, make sure the final confirmation numbers you are given for reservations by any housing service you book through is the hotel’s number, not theirs.

 

Pre-Blocking your Rooms Together

If you book rooms through a good housing service, they should request that your team’s rooms be pre-blocked (as close) together in the hotel as possible. The same is true with booking direct with a hotel’s sales department that is experienced at handling sports teams. I say as close as possible, because where your rooms are in a hotel depends on that hotel’s floorplan. If you have 15 double/doubles, and the rooms on each floor of that hotel are alternating doubles/doubles and kings, your team’s rooms could be spread out more or may even be on more than one floor. There is no reason to complain in this case, as there isn’t anything the hotel can do about that. But you should ask whoever you are doing the booking with to block you as close together as possible. Also, if you are traveling with younger kids, there should be a chaperone in each room so if the rooms are split up on different floors, or at two ends of the same floor, you do not have kids in rooms off by themselves.

 

Share the Hotel Contract Terms with your Parent

If you have to agree to and sign a contract for your hotel block, you should make all of the parents on your team aware of what the contract entails. In particular, cancellation deadlines and early departure fees that are in the contract will not go away if a parent tells the hotel “I didn’t know about those terms.” Instead of anyone being surprised by basic terms and condition that are in most every hotel contract, inform everyone on your team and there will be less issues later.

 

Check-In / Check-Out Times

Another term you should communicate to the parents is the Check-In and Check-Out time of the hotel. Most hotels advertise a 3:00 or 4:00 pm check-in time, and an 11:00 am or 12:00 noon Check-Out time. A hotel’s ability to let a customer check in before their advertised check-in time is based mostly on how full they were the night before, and thus, how many rooms the housekeeping department has to clean the day of your arrival. The parents should be informed that if they arrive before the advertised check-in time, they may have to check their bags with the concierge or front desk, and come back later. As for a late checkout, the good news is that many hotels have a lower occupancy on Sunday nights, so if you are checking out on Sunday, you may be granted a 1 or 2-hour late checkout. But if they don’t grant it, or you have an early afternoon game that if you lose you go home and if you win you stay one more night, then have that conversation with the MOD (Manager on Duty) of the hotel after you check-in. Inform the MOD that your team won’t be back until (fill in the time), and he/she will tell you how they want that handled. In most cases, you will be asked to check-out, store your luggage, and then when you come back after the game to let them know if you are staying another night or leaving.

 

Overbooking and Walk Policies

If you arrive at the hotel and they are overbooked, the hotel will try to move your reservation to another hotel. Your rights in these cases are generally clearly defined by the hotel’s parent company, and usually looks something like this:

  • Relocation and transportation to another hotel
  • Payment of first night room & tax
  • Difference in rate if the new hotel’s rate is higher
  • Payment for lost amenities, in particular a free breakfast
  • Option to return to the first hotel if there is availability the next night

That being said, unless the hotel they are walking your rooms to is nicer and/or closer to where you are playing, you should at least try protesting the move. Here are some talking points

  • Offer to consolidate your rooms (if you can, using rollaways) in exchange for some complimentary rooms. It will keep your whole team in the hotel, and save you and the hotel some money. Make sure the rollaways are free as well.
  • Ask that the rooms being walked be upgraded to suites, even if you have to put more people to a room.
  • Offer to trade double/doubles for kings, if the hotel has that roomtype available and you can make it work with your team.

 

Conduct Policy for your Team

THS deals with thousands of amateur sports teams per year, and while most of them behave mannerly and appropriate in the hotel we book them into, some do not. The way we help the experience for both the hotels and the teams is that we provide every hotel with a “Code of Conduct” policy that we suggest the hotel have each team sign at check-in. The policy is a simple set of rules on how act, like when the kids needs to be with an adult, curfew (quiet time) parameters, and other such rules. The smart hotels use it, and the ones that have problems with teams behaving badly generally do not. I suggest that all team leaders take the initiative to have your own team conduct policy for everyone to follow, so you will never be in a position where a hotel or a tournament does not want you back. I’m sure your team has a set of rules about attending practice, and treatment of team mates. They should have one of these as well.

 

Heading off and Dealing with Other Customer Service Issues during your Stay

Hotels and hotel chains are much like restaurants when it comes to competency – many are outstanding and makes great customer service a priority with their staff. Others muddle by with less-than-properly trained employees that don’t understand what quality service is. I have listed the chains and brands that I think do the best job overall, including in the customer service area. However, there are a lot of moving parts in any hotel, and you getting a clean room can rest on something as simple as what kind of mood the housekeeper that cleaned your room was in before you checked into it. That being said, let me outline some of the more common customer service problems you can run into at a hotel:

  • Wrong Roomtype – I have on too many occasions checked into a hotel, then walked to the room only to find it is not the roomtype I reserved. I have learned to confirm the roomtype I am being checked into before I leave the desk. It has saved a lot of return trips to the desk, and also identifies more quickly if there is a problem with them having the roomtype I requested.
  • Poor Condition or Dirty Room – If you check into a room that is in bad shape condition-wise, take a minute evaluate whether you think this is an issue with just your room, or if the entire hotel has these same problems. If it is a matter of your room having a stained carpet or torn wallpaper, and you noticed the hallway on the way to your room looking the same, it may just be that most of the rooms are in that condition. But if there are things in your room that are broken that seem unique to that room, then certainly ask the front desk to move you to a better or upgraded room. If the room is not as clean as you would like, decide if it makes more sense to try to change rooms (the next room could be as dirty), or if you would be better off asking that a housekeeper come in and do some spot cleaning. If the hotel you booked is a COMPLETE catastrophe when you arrive, and you deem it necessary to move your entire team to different hotel, get your list of legitimate problems together, then meet with the hotel GM to make your case of everyone in your group being able to checkout without a cancellation fee. Many GM’s will let you go, trying to accommodate you in the best way possible. If the GM will not agree to that, and as long as you feel you are in the right, direct your parents to dispute the charge with their credit card company. They will likely win.
  • More than 2 people in the Room – All hotel rooms have adequate amount of linen for two or maybe three people, but probably not enough four or more people. Note this as soon as you get to the room, and call housekeeping right away to get the additional linen you need. The hotel will be responsive to your request if their housekeeping department is still open, then at 10 pm at night when there are less staff working.
  • Hotel Staff not Willing to Help – No matter what, a friendly and helpful staff can make a multitude of problems go away. But if you run into any staff member that will not help you resolve an issue, you will have to go up the ladder to find someone higher up whose job is the solve customers’ complaints. In a larger, full service hotel, in addition to management being there during the business day, there is likely an MOD on duty into the later evening and weekends who is the best person to ask for. At smaller hotels in the evening, the MOD could be the same unfriendly desk clerk that is already not helping you. Understanding this, you are better off trying to resolve issues at a smaller hotel between 9 am – 5 pm during the week, than in the evening or over the weekend.
  • Hotel under Renovation – There is nothing more irritating then showing up at a hotel and finding it under renovation. The problem is that when you make a hotel reservation, hotels generally do not advertise that they will be under renovation, even if it is just the pool that is closed, because they do not want to lose your booking. Of course, when you show up at the hotel and find out (in the worst case) that the place is a construction zone, it is generally too late to do anything about. If this is a problem you do not want to deal with, it is best to contact the hotel before your arrival and you are still able to cancel without penalty, to ask if any part of the hotel will be under renovation during your stay.
  • Breakfast Hours not Matching your Game/Competition Schedule – If your team has an early game or competition, you may have to leave the hotel before 7:00 am. Most full service hotel restaurants open by 6:00 am, but some limited service free breakfasts may not open until 7:00 am – too late for you to take advantage of it and leave the hotel on time. This is another situation that can be headed off before you arrive. Do your homework on your hotel’s breakfast hour’s, and if they don’t match up with your expected or potential schedule, make a call to them to see if it can be adjusted. They won’t change it for a couple of rooms, but may for 15 or more rooms.
  • Parking Lot – No matter where your hotel is located, make sure your families do not leave anything of value in their cars, and in particular, in clear site of anyone looking in a window. It doesn’t matter how safe an area is, a laptop sitting on the front seat of a car or mini-van may just be too inviting to someone walking by. Also, most hotels have a safe in the room (generally in the closet) that is ideal for smaller items. Suggest everyone uses those.
  • Dealing with Customer Service Issues after your Stay – All hotel company and management company Customer Complaint Departments are not created equal. The best hotel chains are the most responsive to customers that have a less than desirable stay. The same is true with the best hotel management companies. Both are companies that likely own and or manage a good portion of their hotels. Other hotel chains, like Wyndam and Choice, whose hotel inventory is almost 100% franchised, to a great extent treat their franchise owners as their customers, not the people that actually stay in their hotels. Their often generic “Sorry you had a problem, looking forward to you staying with us again” response letters will be little help to you. If you have problems at any of the better chains like Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, etc., file your complaint directly with their corporate office (the contact information will be on their website). If you are dealing with less-quality conscious brands, see if you can identify if there is a management company that operates it who may be more caring and responsive to your complaint than the franchise company. No matter the company or the brand, it is worth filing a complaint after your stay for grievous problems that your hotel was unable or unwilling to resolve.