Is it common for large companies with a lot of applicants to ignore a job candidate’s follow up email after an interview if they’ve decided not to proceed with the interview process or job offer?

We do it all the time, and — since there's always a chance we could maybe do something next month or quarter with an applicant we passed on this month or quarter, we always try to avoid committing ourselves to an outright refusal — we're probably doing you a favor when we do.

(Unless, of course, it's your attitude that you were entitled to that or any other specific job, in which case we don't want you . . .)

Our application forms (the use of which we we require at every level: we don't accept resumes, letter of reference or recommendation, or other instruments of “obfuscation, misinformation or embellishment”) clearly state that your application is merely a unilateral expression of interest by you and does not, by the simple fact of its submission to us by you, make you a candidate. While as a matter of practice we probably will, we don't owe you to even look at it.

What do you think of the following business name: ''Last Room Club'' for a business selling hotel rooms for the same day with significant discount?

It's as good a name as any for something that there's already dozens of out there, and that even hotel operators who deal with them deal with them at all only because they feel like they have to, lack enthusiasm for, and even resent a little. (Actually, I like the name better than many that I've seen for deep discount online travel agencies.)

As names go, worse can be had, I suppose. Most of the ones I can think of for deep discount OTAs aren't suitable for use in polite company.



A few things that drive us nuts:

We don't like dumping our rooms cheap because we can't find a way to rent them for a decent price. If we can afford not to, we won't. I'd rather let a few $140-per-night rooms stand empty than to rent them to people who, if I let them have it for $75 one time, will get spoiled and never again see them as worth more than $75. Letting you sell our $140 a night rooms for fifty bucks, and making it too easy for too many people to get them at that price, doesn't exactly enhance the perceived value of our product — why should anyone want to pay even a hundred bucks a night for something you can get for fifty bucks? And when we have to because we can't afford not to, it makes us sick. If you're just doing it because you need the money, you may be relieved to getthe money, but it still makes you feel like a loser.

How do you know a hotel will do well in a given location?

I've seen hotels built for the most respectable reasons, after carefully researching a market, the planned location of the hotel, and that area's needs, and what sort of hotel would best answer those needs. I've seen them built for reasons as not-so-respectable as the fact that the owner owned the site and wanted to put a hotel on it (never mind it would be the worst part of town in which to locate a hotel, or that town had less-than-zero need or demand for new hotels at all), or someone had friends, family or a girlfriend living in a certain town; or someone had a relative who needed a job and the owner figured, how hard can running a hotel be? People who can access the resources to build a hotel can put one wherever they can secure a building site, and many do so, shall we say, quite freely.

Here is how I go about it.

We look at the specific location within a town that we have in mind. Just being in one part of town or another can make quite a difference even in a smaller city. So, you want to sort out your existing hotels in a city by the individual submarkets within that city in which they are located.

HVS divides most larger cities into recognized submarkets, but you can identify them yourself (adequately, if not altogether accurately by HVS's methodology) by bringing up a city in which you're considering a new hotel on Google Maps, searching 'hotels', and noticing in what areas of town that the little red symbols that represent the hotels that come up seem to be clustered on that map. A few isolated properties will occur, but each of these clusters indicates the presence of a separate submarket.