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Fortunately, in Vegas you don't need to be [a high roller]. You just need to tip the checkin clerk. And the best part is that you feel like Sinatra while you're doing it.
The conventional wisdom is that you'll have more success with male clerks than females, but the dozen or so people working checkin were all women. I scoped out my choices and picked my line. I walked up to the front of the line when it was my turn, struck up a conversation, and pulled out my drivers license and credit card... with a $100 bill folded beneath it (with the amount clearly showing).
In most properties a $20 should do the trick. At the Bellagio I'm guessing a $20 wouldn't get me far, maybe the lakeview I was already in. Would a $50 have worked? Probably. But the $100 provides the wow 'pop' factor, and I really wanted a better room. Plus, I was planning to stay 4 nights so it's really just an extra $25 a night (with no tax!).
I politely asked whether any upgraded rooms might be available, and that I'd especially love "one of those big penthouse suites." She looked at the $100 and said, "let me see what I can find."
Chances hadn't seemed good, since I checked online and the hotel was completely sold out. No rooms available for purchase, what if all the suites had been allocated? But I suppose they were probably oversold on standard rooms and someone was going to have to get moved up. I just figured I should make sure I secured that upgrade.
The woman at checkin pounded at the keyboard and was having a terribly difficult time of it. It didn't help that I was checking in at 1pm. Not all the rooms were cleaned yet, and she couldn't assign a room that wasn't ready even if I was willing to wait for it (and she couldn't risk my coming back to get keys from another checkin clerk!).
Finally she found a room that she promised I'd like. It was a two-bedroom, five bath suite in the Spa tower. Over two thousand square feet, my biggest suite score of the year (topping the 1650 square foot Diplomatic Suite at the Intercontinental Bangkok I had back in April).
She handed me the keys, I pushed forward the $100, and she placed it in her pocket. Pleasure doing business with you!
The whole transaction took place right under the nose of the assistant front desk manager, the checkin line I used was right next to the manager's station. I really don't know why clerks in Vegas regularly get away with this, perhaps it's so ingrained in the culture that the cost to the hotel to monitor and disabuse the behavior is too high for it to be worth it. And perhaps wages for front desk clerks are depressed to account for their ability to supplement their income on their own. I can only speculate on the economics and motives of it.
But someone is going to get moved up to a suite. In some circles it's done by status. In others it's random. In Vegas, tips are king -- at checkin, at the show, everywhere. It's culturally acceptable here, where in most other places it's not. And I'm generally comfortable applying local ethos and customs and not binding myself by my own provincial norms.
Sure, you could read "tip" as "bribe" -- but it's no secret to the hotels and I'll defer to their judgment on the appropriateness of the technique. Mostly I wanted to see how well it would work.
Thanks to Flyertalk's skofarrell for plenty of tips on the technique. Here's my previous post on the $20 trick and my other tips for scoring a hotel upgrade.
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