Hotels hope for post-storm boost
Following a second prolonged blackout in two months, Fairfield County homeowners learned the perils of keeping stocked freezers.
For his part, Joe Kelly is stocking up at the Stamford Marriot Hotel & Spa.
The 500-plus room hotel soared to full occupancy within hours after the snow started falling ”“ and then branches and trees ”“ in Fairfield County during the Oct. 29 nor”™easter. That had Kelly in his role as general manager scrambling to bring in extra staff to handle the refugees streaming in from houses gone dark throughout the area.
On Sunday, the hotel converted to an always-on buffet, even as it scrambled to get more food to serve diners. And Kelly said families brought in some 25 dogs and three cats to the pet-friendly facility.
For the Stamford Marriott and other local hotels, it marked both a test and a major opportunity to market its venue to area businesspeople ”“ only time will tell whether that will result in increased bookings for conference space.
“It”™s tough to gauge, but we got a lot (of) very good feedback,” Kelly said. “If nothing else, we certainly established ourselves as the place to be in this kind of thing.”
It wasn”™t just the Stamford Marriott, of course ”“ Norwalk-based Priceline.com Inc. said mobile devices lit up its Hotel Negotiator app for reserving rooms, with last-minute bookings in the tristate area nearly quadrupling after the nor”™easter hit. Reservations punched in from laptop and desktop computers were also up, nearly 40 percent.
Immediately following the outages on Saturday afternoon and evening ”“ presumably when residents thought the blackout would be short-lived ”“ Priceline customers booked three- and four-star hotels for one-night stays.
Beginning Sunday, when reports started surfacing that the outage could be up to a week or more in some places, there was an immediate booking shift to lower-priced hotels for multiple-day stays, Priceline added.
What”™s more, on Saturday when the snow began falling, Priceline mobile customers were a median distance of 5 miles away from the hotels they booked. By Monday, after nearby hotels rapidly filled up, mobile customers were booking hotels at a median distance of nearly 70 miles away to escape the cold, and that median distance remained in effect for several days until sections of the three states regained power and hotel rooms freed up.
“Incidents like the October nor”™easter demonstrate the value that mobile devices and apps can bring to the travel industry and to travel consumers,” said John Caine, Priceline.com”™s senior vice president of marketing, in a written statement. “Without apps like Hotel Negotiator, many consumers would have been forced to go the ”˜old school”™ route of finding a hotel via the phone book and a flashlight. Such a time-consuming alternative may well have left them out in the cold as area hotels filled up quickly.”
Complicating the picture was the fact that many hotels like the Stamford Marriott had conferences already booked, forcing it to work around those events. And as families started filtering home on the Wednesday following the storm, those rooms were taken by some 150 crews brought in from out of state to clear hazards and restore power.
“It was quite challenging because you go from being a regular hotel to almost like a shelter,” Kelly said. “The one thing we”™ve taken out of it is we”™ve actually revised a bunch of our operating plans on how to respond quicker.”