How to Get a Free Hotel Room by Complaining

Enjoying the sweet hotel life to get away from the stress you face in your everyday life can be quite expensive. This is the reason why many people are always on the lookout to get free discount coupons to crash down the costs of their hotel booking, including signing up for hotel loyalty membership freebies, among other tactics.

For the most part, these tactics produce results a greater percentage of the time for many people who deploy them, but there are other people, who want more than just discounted or loyalty membership deals. To these people, getting a hotel room totally free is the best deal, and their go-to tactic to get it is usually by complaining.

Complaining to get a free hotel room can be difficult, but is totally doable given the fact that most hotels will do anything to make the experience you have with them memorable. After scouring through the internet to research various ways to go about it, here is a compilation of tips and tricks on how to complain the right way, in order to get a free hotel room.

Complain About Something Reasonable

As much as you have every right to complain about the services of any hotel, it is important that you ensure your complaint is reasonable or legitimate. This is because hotel staff have experience with receiving outrageous complaints, as they get many complaints from customers every other day. Hence be sure that they can tell when you are trying to use a lie to get freebies.

Complaining about an issue will only earn you a free hotel stay if it warrants it. Therefore, you might want to refrain from making complaints about small issues, or complaining about events that are beyond the hotel’s control such as flight delays or the occurrence of harsh weather conditions.

You stand the chance of getting a free night’s stay if your complaint is legitimate and within reason. For example, if you have genuine grievances about your stay such as hearing disturbing noises from the room next door or broken fixtures in your room, the hotel will certainly be able to resolve them or be more willing to compensate you for the inconveniences caused.

Complain at the Right Time to the Right Channel

The last thing you want to do is complain to the wrong person or channel about your grievances. If you have any complaints, it is advised that you voice them out immediately, if possible. Sharing your concerns with the right staff will increase your chances of getting a successful resolution of your issue, including getting considered for a free stay as compensation.

The front desk staff is usually best equipped to resolve complaints, but in the event that they can’t fix your problem or aren’t taking it seriously, you can ask to speak with one of the hotel managers, or someone else with a higher authority, or ability to address it.

If you happen to go through all the appropriate channels, but are yet to get your complaint satisfactorily treated, you might want to consider contacting the corporate headquarters of the hotel to present your case with names, dates, photographic or video evidence, including any other supporting details that can help with the prompt and effective treatment of your case.

Complain in a Respectful Manner

Respect, they say, is reciprocal. Having said that, complaining rudely or in an unreasonable way to the hotel staff will certainly reduce your chances of getting compensated with a free room. The hotel staff will feel more encouraged to listen to your complaint and luckily compensate you for any inconveniences caused if you approach them in a polite manner.

However, if being nice doesn’t work, you can always escalate the issue on social media or simply go public with it. Many companies, including hotels, tend to respond faster to complaints and offer compensation when customers complain about their services on social media because they have a reputation to protect, and also because a happy customer is a returning customer.

Be Discreet When Complaining

Combined with a respectful approach, observing discretion when making your complaint is also important to increase your chances of getting a free hotel room. An example is you not complaining your way into getting a freebie in the presence of other customers. Everyone else will also want the same benefits if they gave you, so they’d obviously refrain from giving you.

It is also worth emphasizing that you should refrain from outrightly demanding a free hotel room when you lay your complaint. The most effective approach is to give them a reason to offer it to you. Asking for a free room outrightly will only make the hotel staff suspicious of your motive as they are most likely well aware of similar antics by previous customers from experience.

That said, a better approach you could adopt would be to wait for your chance when there is no one else present at the front desk aside from you. Only then should you lay your complaint, but remember to do so respectfully and also persistently, if necessary. Hopefully, your complaint will be heard and you’ll be offered a hotel room to stay in for free as compensation.

Conclusion

Generally speaking, the only time hotels actually get to hear from customers is usually when they’ve provided bad service. Most of the time, they never get feedbacks from customers when they are able to resolve their issues successfully.

Therefore, whenever you complain at any hotel about any issue and they eventually compensate you with a freebie such as a free hotel room, endeavor to thank them for the offer right after getting it and also when checking out. It would definitely go a long way in helping them improve their customer service further in the future

Another thing you should have in mind is not expecting complaining to always get you a free hotel room, upgrade, or any other form of compensation whenever you try. The strategy doesn’t work all the time. However, whenever you do use it, we emphasize once again that you ensure your reason is reasonable and genuine because they might find out eventually. So, be careful!


1 thought on “How to Get a Free Hotel Room by Complaining”

Leave a Comment