UPDATES:
Do-Over Announced By Leading Hotels Of The World
$19.28 5-Star Hotel Room Promo Ends In Fiasco
For 80 minutes on October 1, more than 90 world-class hotels will offer up their gaudy rooms for only $19.28 per night. Starting at 8 a.m., the Leading Hotels of the World, a debonair batch of swanky hotels, will drop their prices in homage to their founding year, 1928.
Most of the posh hotels are in Europe but there are a handful of domestic gems on sale, including:
Enchantment Resort & Mii Amo Spa (Sedona, Arizona)
Bernardus Lodge (Carmel Valley, California)
The Hay-Adams (Washington, D.C.)
Biltmore, Miami (Coral Gables, Florida) – (pictured)
The James Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)
Wheatleigh (Lenox, Massachusetts)
La Posada de Santa Fe Resort & Spa, A Rock Resort (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
The Alex Hotel (New York, New York)
GMail users might want to take advantage of plus-messaging when they register:
As part of the pre-registration for this promotion, The Leading Hotels of the World, Ltd. will be collecting email addresses. The Leading Hotels of the World, Ltd. reserves the right to use these emails for the purpose of communication regarding the 1928 offer as well as other promotional offers.
The offer is tempting, though we’re sure we’ll wake up at 8 a.m. to stare at 408 timeout errors. Still, twenty bucks for a midtown hotel…
Luxe travel deal: the Leading Hotels of the World on sale for $19.28 [Daily Travel & Deal Blog]
Celebrate LHW’s 80th with USD 19.28 [The Leading Hotels of the World]
(Photo: Getty) (Thanks to Sacha!)
Now I just need to find myself a lady to take with me to New Mexico, since that’s the closest one to me. Thing is, even if I do find a lady, I doubt she’ll want to drive with me to New Mexico after being with me for 2 weeks. Seems kinda creepy, no?
@Thassodar: You only have to book the room at that time, not go on the trip.
@geofriend: Ugh, getting up at 5 am for this sounds wonderful, I guess I’m glad it has no hotel in an area I’d be going to.
I have been fortunate enough to stay in some of these hotels before, and I can attest to their quality (it is possible to find deals on these places if your timing is right – certainly not $20 a night though).
I only wish this promotion was getting less attention, as it will be impossible to actually book any of these rooms when they become available (as the website will be absolutely flooded).
I will certainly be pinned to my desk that morning hoping to score a deal. It would be an amazing score.
Now I can finally go to Chicago after having lived only a few hours away for 3 years! One of the links says it starts at noon GMT which I believe means it starts at 8 a.m. EST for all of those people who were confused like me. Hope everyone in California has fun with that…. 5am….
Ok that is one freaky picture with this article
I’ll start looking on ebay at 8:05.
8 a.m. in which time zone?
@Garbanzo: It starts at noon GMT, which I think is 8am CST.
[www.timeanddate.com]
Damn. I’d love to get a swanky hotel room in Sedona (closest one) for $20. But not enough to be awake at 5 am in the morning. Ugh.
@Garbanzo: it’s noon GMT, which is 8 am EST (not CST)
@geofriend:
@geckospots:
@Garbanzo:
GMT is 5 hours ahead of eastern and 6 hours ahead of central. At least right now…when does daylight savings end this year?
People! Noon GMT = 8:00 AM EDT = 7:00 AM EST, etc.
It’s not a trivial distinction because not every location in the contiguous U.S. observes Daylight Saving Time.
@pigbearpug: According to Wikipedia, this year, DST in the U.S. ends on Sunday, November 2.
The Wheatleigh is the closest one to me and its pretty obvious that this ‘deal’ would be for “The Small Room” which is 10×12 and has a double bed.
On their rates page it goes for $650 a nite! WTF is THAT??
There’s no way in hell I’d ever pay that for a 10×12 room with a double bed unless it has an all-night blowjob machine built in.
I mean, you’re already getting fucked. Why not add to the fun.
@homerjay: Indeed, although it’d have to be a really amazing machine for even $650.
I looked briefly at their site and saw rooms that seemed to go for about $1000 / night. I just stopped lookingt after that. I didn’t realize they had them as low as $650, or I’d have booked right then!
I’m going to throw caution – and my email address – to the wind and try for the DC or NY hotel, since those are closest to me. Although, I work in DC, so I may try the NY one first haha.
id love to see reaction of some of the “upper crusters” trying to enjoy their fancy breakfast in the dining room when one of the $20 a night guests asks where the pop tarts are located on the buffet…
Yeah – during the summer DST Months, Eastern is GMT-4; in the winter it’s GMT-5.
Does this thing apply to room bookings for a stay at any time, so long as the booking is made 10/1? Interesting.
Oh man, I’m going to DC this weekend, I guess we’ll have to do another trip very soon as well. The rooms on there look to be 200-3000 (3000? Um, pass?) so I’m going to try and take advantage of this one…
way to get my hopes up, LHW! The promotion is incredibly restrictive, and useless to me. I was hoping to use it for a trip to NYC in October, but nope. You can only book a maximum of two nights, and you have to travel between November 1 and December 15. Who plans a trip that would involve a stay in a hotel like that with only a months’ notice?
I did! We got our dates ready, the card ready, 8am comes and…
‘Sorry! Due to the overwhelming number of consumers currently trying to access this promotion, your request is being delayed momentarily. Please be patient, don’t get discouraged, and retry in a few seconds by clicking here, or by going back to [www.lhw.com]‘
Which means you just click over and over for 80 minutes. I don’t know if this is even a promotion at all or just a way to get website hits…
The consumerist should investigate further. I signed up weeks early, and was at my computer at 8:01 sharp and the message has been there ever since. I smell a scam…so far, thanks for getting my hopes up LWH. I’ll post back if anything changes.
Definitely a scam. Same message since 7:45 am, which was about 1,000 hits of the “refresh” button ago. I don’t think anyone is getting these rooms.
Seriously though…WTF? On a forum it said someone had contacted them and the booking system for the promotion was only letting one person in at a time…what? People on the the thread claim to have gotten hotel rooms but…
Hilarious threads of everyone trying but nobody getting on:
[www.flyertalk.com]
[forums.moneysavingexpert.com]
Probably this is an example of technical incompetence rather than an actual scam, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.
And now:
“Due to the overwhelming number of consumers participating in this promotion, we regret to inform you that due to technical difficulties beyond our control the 1928 promotion has been suspended indefinitely.”
Really? Mine doesn’t say that. I tried using other browsers, locations, proxies…
I’m pretty sure it was just a massive email harvest.
And now someone in another forum reports:
“Thank you for your interest in the 1928 Promotion.
We regret to inform you [Regret? Nah. We have your email address! Let the spamming begin!] that the more than 6000 room nights available [A number we pulled out of our asses, like "$700 billion"] at the start of this promotion have all been sold. Congratulations to the lucky [read: NONEXISTENT] participants who were able to get a reservation as part of this great offer!
Still interested in travelling with us? While we can’t offer you rooms at USD 19.28, we can still offer some great values [For the 20 of you Wall Streeters who can still afford us], including bundles of 3 nights for the price of 2, 4 for the price of 3, or 7 for the price of 5, as well as discounted weekend rates and other Leading Offers.”
We must be on different servers, mine still says the old message. What a lame company. Pretty much the worst promotion ever. Not because I didn’t get it, because NOBODY got it.
People on Flyertalk and Slickdeals now report getting emails like this in response to their own irate feedback to various people at LHW:
Unfortunately, we’ve had to suspend the sale due to overwhelming demand. Although we were aware of the traffic volume and made preparations ahead of time to accommodate it, the volume of traffic nonetheless outstripped our enhanced capacity. In lieu of the online process, we will be running an alternative email based sale shortly, as most of the inventory is still unsold.
You should be receiving an email from us shortly describing the specifics, but the details you’ve provided in terms of your intentions are exactly what we are going to be asking of our consumers. With this in mind, I’ll try to get your request into the queue.
With sincere apologies for your inconvenience,
Robert Cantave
Director of Marketing Technology
The Leading Hotels of the World, Ltd.
Here is a list of executives I put together. I’m not a member of any forums but you can post them if you like. I’m carpet bombing them just for fun.
info@lhw.com
khehir@lhw.com
tteng@lhw.com
webeling@lhw.com
mcalder@lhw.com
jlondeen@lhw.com
ckaplan@lhw.com
ksimmons@lhw.com
press@lhw.com
From flyertalk:
Just got off the phone with Customer Service for the Leader’s Club. They informed me that they’ll be sending out an email to all the people who registered for the promo by the end of the day. Let’s keep an eye out for it since they said it’ll have another offer for us and the chance to take advantage of the promo, afterall.
Their website experienced a traffic spike around 100x the norm from this promo which means their IT Dept totally underestimated the response they’d receive. They claimed to be hosted in collocation facility (data center) with their 800#’s pointing to a call center. Being in telecom, that kinda shocked me since this means their fiasco could’ve easily been avoided if LHW spent enough money on bandwidth and hosted the site on a real server… guess, they didn’t think of redundancy for their main website… but then again, I think most of us saw this one coming a few days ago.