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From their FAQ: "Is it worth the investment? Absolutely. Hotels equipped with Rest have seen an 84x increase in smoking fine collection. Plus, our smoking

by cpard 1y ago

From their FAQ: "Is it worth the investment? Absolutely. Hotels equipped with Rest have seen an 84x increase in smoking fine collection. Plus, our smoking detection technology helps prevent damage to rooms and reduce a number of future violations." Apparently there are way more people smoking than we thought there are or the sensor just generates a lot of false positives. The language they are using all over the site is very interesting though, see here an example: From how it works: "Automatically charge If smoking is detected, your staff gets notified, simplifying the process of charging smoking fees." With a system with false positives, it makes total sense to use real time notifications to staff to go and check what's going on, that would be legit, but then on top saying that you automatically charge? It almost feels like they are selling a way to fraud to their customers while covering themselves against any litigation by using the right copy in there to support that it's the responsibility of the Hotel staff to go and check in real time that the violation is actually happening.

jfengel 1y ago
Is there that much smoking in hotels? Do they charge more for smoking rooms? A number like 84x suggests that it's basically zero now. That kinda makes sense. The only one who would notice is the cleaning staff, and relying on their word for "it smelled like smoke" sounds like a way to get a chargeback. They'd call you on it only if they were forced to take the room out of rotation to air it out. So maybe there are a lot of people smoking just a little (perhaps a joint), and getting away with it. That might make a number like 84x work.
- vkou 1y ago
  A number like 84x implies that it's almost entirely false positives.
  - gpm 1y ago
    No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking. Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
    - vkou 1y ago
      The hotels don't ever catch people in the act, they just let housekeeping report that the room smells like smoke and they take the fine out of your deposit. That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        Leave a $20 for the housekeeper and you won't get reported.
        cowsandmilk 1y ago
        Why wouldn’t they report you? It isn’t like you know who your housekeeper is or that they have any reason to believe you’ll be a repeat guest that will continue to tip them.
        vkou 1y ago
        They'll happily take the $20 and then report you, because it's their job on the line when the next guest complains that the room smells like shit. There's no way to conceal cigarette smoke indoors. It's painfully obvious that a room's been smoked in. Vapes are way lower-key, and as a non-smoker/vaper/etc, unlike cigarettes, someone vaping in a space really doesn't bother me.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      > Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before. How? How does this track? Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide! If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke. Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it. If someone smokes in a room and you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low! The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
  - john-h-k 1y ago
    It doesn’t imply that. I’m pretty sure it is all false positives, but that number does not imply that. It could simply be that only ~1 in 84 smokers was being fined before
    - jfengel 1y ago
      A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>” Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.
        hinkley 1y ago
        50% reduction in death rate sounds impressive until you find out it’s 3 out of 8 billion people, true.
      - john-h-k 1y ago
        > No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>” Orthogonal. I said it doesn’t imply it, and it doesn’t. It may suggest it’s likely - and it does - but it does not imply it.
- ludicrousdispla 1y ago
  The last time I walked into a hotel room that smelled like cigarette smoke was in 1998, so I would think this is very uncommon.
  - zeroonetwothree 1y ago
    I had one in 2022. I immediately asked for a different room.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    I can't recall the last time. Smoking in the US is way, way down. Not gone, to be sure, but it was crashing even before vapes.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      In particular, it’s way, way down among the cohort of the population that have lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        Truck drivers and lots of trades crews (e.g. linesmen) stay in hotels all the time. But typically they are not staying at the Hyatt. There is a whole tier of hotels and other services targeted at the traveling working class which you won't encounter as a highly paid tech professional simply because your company won't book you there.
        aerostable_slug 1y ago
        I chatted with a motel owner in the middle of nowhere, Arizona who made his yearly nut off seasonal melon pickers, usually Mexican nationals on agricultural work visas. They need a place to stay, too. Otherwise, he had the kind of quiet, far out of the way old motel you see in horror movies (which I particularly love) and the odd foreign film set in America. I ran into traveling road crews (as in CalTrans contractors building highways) visiting a facility for my current employer. Interesting crowd. The pay is good, and the only real requirements seem to be the willingness to wake up early, work hard, and not be insufferable to work with.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  I can't imagine people getting charged by this system not doing chargebacks.
- gamblor956 1y ago
  Is there that much smoking in hotels? Surprisingly, yes. Smoking experienced a significant uptick during COVID. Post-COVID, a lot of the housekeeping staff wear masks when cleaning guest rooms, so they're not always able to notice the smells that a guest would notice upon first entering the room. I've had to get 3 out of my last 10 hotel rooms changed because the previous occupant smoked. On my last business trip, this resulted in an upgrade to a suite because they had no more regular rooms available.
- cowsandmilk 1y ago
  I’m fairly certain that most US hotels, you will get complaints from the neighboring rooms about someone smoking. I don’t think you need to rely on the cleaning staff for detection.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
autarch 1y ago
I can think of two instances in the last 10 years where I've stayed at a hotel and had my room become disgustingly full of pot smell from someone else in the hotel. So yes, people smoke in hotels. That said, I haven't smelled _cigarette_ smoke in a hotel in recent memory.

by cpard 1y ago

jfengel 1y ago

Is there that much smoking in hotels? Do they charge more for smoking rooms? A number like 84x suggests that it's basically zero now. That kinda makes sense. The only one who would notice is the cleaning staff, and relying on their word for "it smelled like smoke" sounds like a way to get a chargeback. They'd call you on it only if they were forced to take the room out of rotation to air it out. So maybe there are a lot of people smoking just a little (perhaps a joint), and getting away with it. That might make a number like 84x work.

vkou 1y ago
A number like 84x implies that it's almost entirely false positives.
- gpm 1y ago
  No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking. Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
  - vkou 1y ago
    The hotels don't ever catch people in the act, they just let housekeeping report that the room smells like smoke and they take the fine out of your deposit. That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Leave a $20 for the housekeeper and you won't get reported.
      - cowsandmilk 1y ago
        Why wouldn’t they report you? It isn’t like you know who your housekeeper is or that they have any reason to believe you’ll be a repeat guest that will continue to tip them.
      - vkou 1y ago
        They'll happily take the $20 and then report you, because it's their job on the line when the next guest complains that the room smells like shit. There's no way to conceal cigarette smoke indoors. It's painfully obvious that a room's been smoked in. Vapes are way lower-key, and as a non-smoker/vaper/etc, unlike cigarettes, someone vaping in a space really doesn't bother me.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    > Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before. How? How does this track? Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide! If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke. Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it. If someone smokes in a room and you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low! The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
- john-h-k 1y ago
  It doesn’t imply that. I’m pretty sure it is all false positives, but that number does not imply that. It could simply be that only ~1 in 84 smokers was being fined before
  - jfengel 1y ago
    A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>” Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.
      - hinkley 1y ago
        50% reduction in death rate sounds impressive until you find out it’s 3 out of 8 billion people, true.
    - john-h-k 1y ago
      > No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>” Orthogonal. I said it doesn’t imply it, and it doesn’t. It may suggest it’s likely - and it does - but it does not imply it.
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
The last time I walked into a hotel room that smelled like cigarette smoke was in 1998, so I would think this is very uncommon.
- zeroonetwothree 1y ago
  I had one in 2022. I immediately asked for a different room.
- jfengel 1y ago
  I can't recall the last time. Smoking in the US is way, way down. Not gone, to be sure, but it was crashing even before vapes.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    In particular, it’s way, way down among the cohort of the population that have lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Truck drivers and lots of trades crews (e.g. linesmen) stay in hotels all the time. But typically they are not staying at the Hyatt. There is a whole tier of hotels and other services targeted at the traveling working class which you won't encounter as a highly paid tech professional simply because your company won't book you there.
      - aerostable_slug 1y ago
        I chatted with a motel owner in the middle of nowhere, Arizona who made his yearly nut off seasonal melon pickers, usually Mexican nationals on agricultural work visas. They need a place to stay, too. Otherwise, he had the kind of quiet, far out of the way old motel you see in horror movies (which I particularly love) and the odd foreign film set in America. I ran into traveling road crews (as in CalTrans contractors building highways) visiting a facility for my current employer. Interesting crowd. The pay is good, and the only real requirements seem to be the willingness to wake up early, work hard, and not be insufferable to work with.
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
I can't imagine people getting charged by this system not doing chargebacks.
gamblor956 1y ago
Is there that much smoking in hotels? Surprisingly, yes. Smoking experienced a significant uptick during COVID. Post-COVID, a lot of the housekeeping staff wear masks when cleaning guest rooms, so they're not always able to notice the smells that a guest would notice upon first entering the room. I've had to get 3 out of my last 10 hotel rooms changed because the previous occupant smoked. On my last business trip, this resulted in an upgrade to a suite because they had no more regular rooms available.
cowsandmilk 1y ago
I’m fairly certain that most US hotels, you will get complaints from the neighboring rooms about someone smoking. I don’t think you need to rely on the cleaning staff for detection.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

autarch 1y ago

I can think of two instances in the last 10 years where I've stayed at a hotel and had my room become disgustingly full of pot smell from someone else in the hotel. So yes, people smoke in hotels. That said, I haven't smelled _cigarette_ smoke in a hotel in recent memory.