This week’s Compensation Clinic is making a stop at Hyatt again, where I had an issue with an in-house order system for dining, offered via QR Code and mobile App from the room.
Readers are encouraged to send us questions, comments, or opinions by email, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We’ll cover them here several times a week.
While I like the new technical advances that hotels offer their guests, it appears that more often than not it’s best to keep it traditional and place your order by phone or in person.
I had my 60th night Globalist requalification stay at a Caption hotel last week, and they had a nice promotion for dinner. As the weather was pretty bad, I decided to just eat in and use the option to pre-order via mobile app from the dinner selection.
Entering the order was easy enough; I even left notes that I’d come down at a specific time (15 min later), and once I was down, I even approached the staff member to let them know about my mobile order.
Well, nothing happened, and ~15 min later she came back and said the order was – for whatever reason – scheduled for 8:45 pm. At this point I already had enough and just left, despite the inhospitable weather I wasn’t in the mood anymore to wait another 30 minutes due to this mess.
Instead, I found a nice Japanese meal and ordered the same Tonkatsu Curry as I had the previous day from a shop not too far away:
Needless to say, I wrote the hotel a scathing email later on, complaining about the bad experience with the ordering system and the restaurant.
I think that there are some backend issues that whoever installed it on the hotel side didn’t fully explain to the restaurant staff, let alone make them visible to the customer.
During a meeting the next day, management apologized and offered 5000 points as compensation which arrived by the end of the week.
What’s more important is that my Globalist status is now secured for another year and I’m under no pressure to do any more towards the end of the year, being more free in my hotel choices.
The one good thing about points compensation with Hyatt is that it balances out the abysmal points earning ratio during your actual stays because the amount of points earned based on your spend is really awful.
Despite several program refreshes over the year and a massive points inflation (especially for desired properties after introducing Categories 6,7 and now 8) the earning ratio stayed exactly the same and the elite bonus for Globalists is only 30% while other programs at least give their elites a 100% bonus. So yes, getting a few points as compensation for problems every now and then at least eases the pain a little.
Conclusion
I really hate when restaurants don’t have traditional menus and rather just give you a QR code to scan. Yet another task you’re now supposed to do yourself: ordering and skimming through a menu on your cellphone.
If you then encounter some technical mix-up in the process, it makes everything even more frustrating. Ironically, this Caption had a similar system in place when it first opened, but only for breakfast. It was abandoned after the first month due to similar issues.
The best is really to just go to the restaurant, place the order in person, or, at the very least, call the order in to confirm.