The Beechmont Beerware Hotel Development Index

This is something new that we got our guys started on, and got to thinking, we could work it into something useful that we could charge for. It's still a work in progress, so we use a 'beerware' pricing model (only charging real money for custom work)

Over time, we'll refine it. We're also going to add marketing data such as traffic and demand generators.

Thank you for your support.

Click here for the index.

Hotels: How do people choose a hotel?

It's very much an individual decision. There are as many possible answers to this question as there are hotel guests. 

Actually there are more possible answers than there are individuals. Every individual has his priorities, but for each person, one or more secondary factors will be taken into account as well -- many of which will still be significant enough to make a difference in whether or not he wants the room at a particular hotel at all, and any of the others sufficient to prompt him to choose one hotel over another.

If I knew them all, I could retire comfortably in just a few years. (And if I knew, out of fifty-odd numbers, which six will win next week's Powerball jackpot, I could retire even more quickly.)  But I can't. I'm not a mind reader.  Besides, there's seven billion people on the planet, times . . . how many features, and services, and amenities are on your list of 'must have' items when you check into a hotel (as you'll see, they don't have to be big things . . .), times . . . how many possible combinations after you take into account all the other possible things in or about a hotel that you could care less about?  Do the math. It's a big number.

Several factors do turn up over and again, however:

What specific criteria a hotel has to meet to become a Leading Hotels of the World?

Apply, and pass a punchlist to show that you meet their standards, as your hotel would with any franchise organization. 

That's all The Leading Hotels of the World is, a 'consortium', a membership organization, like Best Western.

As to anything more specific, you'd have to ask them. I can't speak for them and since, I suspect, many of the 'standards' at that luxury tier are subjective and will even vary by property, I wouldn't dare try.



My only qualification to answer this question at all is that I've actually stayed in one: a few years back, the Hotel Bethlehem in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was an LHW. I still have a copy of the printed directory in which they appeared.

The Hotel Bethlehem is really nice. I wasn't served tea, so I can't speak to the 'requirements' for how they do it (nor anything else about the service - I'm sure bell service was available, but I only had one bag that I didn't mind schlepping up to the room myself). Indeed, I used to live in Bethlehem and I love that hotel, both for all the usual reasons, and because I used to work for the company that almost bought it (with yours truly putting a flea in their ear, coming up with the idea and egging them on and encouraging them) when its owners went into bankruptcy in 1998 and the opportunity came up for us to buy it, renovate it, and for me to be the project manager (an opportunity to bring a unique set of skills into play, since my degree is in architectural technology, not a hospitality field) and carry on afterward as the g.m. of a high-profile, well-regarded property (not bad for a guy whose first job in a hotel was as a night auditor in a run-down hotel owned by a criminal organization).

What you usually choose travel do you prefer classic hotel or budget hotel?

I like classic hotels as an occasional treat, but for trip-to-trip use, I’m not fussy.

What I’ll do is bring up a city on TripAdvisor, rank all the hotels by lowest cost, scroll down past the voodoo hellholes, and go with the least expensive hotel that has a bubble score of 3.5 or higher that’s located in a part of town that will work for me . . .

Example: let’s go to Nashville, Tennessee; and unless my reason for going to Nashville is in another part of town, I’d want to be near Lipscomb University.

Rank them by lowest price. Scroll past the 2.0-bubble-score Quality Inn and Suites Downtown . . . past the 2.5 Fiddler’s Inn (which Anthony Melchiorri ‘fixed’ — for a day — in an episode of Hotel Impossible a few seasons back) . . . looks like it’s going to be one of those America’s Best Value Inns at 3.5 bubble score, $60. But unless I want to low-budget this trip as much as possible, I’d probably want to pop the extra seventeen bucks and go with the Best Western-Sunrise Inn (4.0 bubble score), because it’s a lot closer to where I want to be . . . although taking the traffic and traffic patterns into account (which I don’t always check Google Maps and do ahead of time), the ABVI Airport South would work just as well.

Originally appeared on Quora