Hotels upgrade their ‘no-stay’ lists

By Amy Bradley-Hole

Travel columnist

updated 11:28 a.m. ET June 18, 2008

Amy Bradley-Hole Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

Most travelers know about the Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly” list. It’s a collection of seemingly random names of passengers who either can’t fly or must endure extra security measures for unknown reasons. But did you know that many hotels keep a similar list of guests that they block from making reservations and setting foot on their properties?

Pretty much every property management system — that’s the generic term for the computer systems hotels use to run all aspects of their business — has a data field where a staff member can enter comments about guests. Employees populate the field with reminders that it’s your birthday, an alert that you’ve had a package arrive or information about your likes and dislikes.

But that field is also used to track guest “issues.” As a customer service tool, it’s great, because other staff members can see if you’ve had a previous problem, and can therefore go out of their way to make you happy. Those comments have also been a way for hotels to track guest patterns of complaining, late cancellations, room damage — you name it.

And as technology has improved, it’s allowed these comments to follow you from hotel to hotel within a chain.

It’s not really clear how you get your name on the TSA list, but it’s a little clearer as to how you make the hotel blacklist. There are two main ways: act like a total idiot, or be a repeat complainer.

Wanna-be rock stars who trash a room to the tune of thousands of dollars will likely be blacklisted. (For all you gossip lovers, there’s a Web site that tracks the latest news on which celebrities have been blacklisted from which hotels and why.) And so will obnoxious business travelers who treat a property like their private playground.

As more and more guests become willing to tell on their naughty neighbors, hotel staff must weed out the poorly-behaved minority in order to keep the nice majority happy. Guests with this type of bad behavior may be kicked out of a hotel just for that stay, or they may be banned for a lengthier period of time.

But the chronic complainers often get banned permanently. These are the freebie-lovers who, on every visit, have some sort of problem for which they demand comps. After a while, this type of guest begins to cost a hotel more money than they bring in. The hotel staff must either refuse to give them any more comps, or must refuse to provide them any more service. Often, the latter is easier.

And now, blacklisted guests have even more to worry about, as hotels are beginning to share their blacklists.

Get in trouble at a Hilton in Miami, for example, and you may find it hard to get a reservation at a Holiday Inn in Seattle. That’s because extensive databases of individual hotels’ blacklists are being systematically centralized.

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Any property can send in their banned names, but hotels can also buy “memberships” that allow them access to this database. Whether hotels will contribute and subscribe to these services en masse is still in question, but as money gets tight, hotels may do more and more to keep out guests whose undesirable traits can hurt the bottom line.

(Actually, this idea isn’t entirely new. The state of Nevada keeps a ”List of Excluded Persons” with the names of cheaters, slot scammers and card counters who aren’t allowed to enter casinos. And if a pit boss has to kick out a con man, he’ll usually immediately call and warn his counterparts at other local casinos.)

One concern about the hotel blacklists comes from one of the failures of the no-fly list. The TSA list is so vague, and the identifying information on each person so general, that way too many innocent people get caught in its trap.

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