Ever been bumped by a hotel you had booked because they goofed and had sold too many rooms? Odds are it’s happened at 2 a.m. because your flight arrived late and the city’s hotels are jam-packed with conventioneers.
Well, now, a group of entrepreneurs believe they’ve created a fix that will save consumers time while they wait (and wait!) for their alternative room plus help hotels save face, according to a recent TechCrunch.com article.
The founder is a guy named Brett Leonard, who used to work at a San Francisco hotel and had the not-so-fun job of finding alternative rooms for customers who had to be “walked,” the story says. Often this process happens while the customer is standing right near the front desk. It would take him hours sometimes, the story says, and he’d “walk” them as far away as – hard to believe – Walnut Creek in the East Bay and Napa.
“This happens all the time,” Leonard’s partner Vladimir Blumen told TechCrunch.com. “When you run a really large hotel, it’s part of running this business.”
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They and a third partner created WalkSource. It’s a system that hotels can buy a subscription to that lets them find nearby hotels willing to accept customers who have been bumped from their original hotel, and as a result, are entitled to a free hotel room. Airlines have a similar system, the story notes. They launched it in San Francisco, which has among the highest hotel rates in the U.S. outside of New York.
Readers: Have you ever been “walked” to an alternate hotel? Tell us about your experience.
