Making check-in, checkout times work for you

In a perfect world, you could check in and out of your hotel room at any hour, without penalty. Pay for 24 hours, get 24 hours, right?

That might work for celebrities and other special people. But most of us mortals pay for 24 hours and actually get 20 or fewer. We check in no earlier than 3 or even 4 p.m., and check out no later than 11 a.m. or noon.

Hoteliers say they will bend their posted policies for big spenders, frequent guests and, if they have an available room, just about anyone else. But you have to ask in advance and be smart about when to push the envelope.

A few plush places will even let you stay a full 24 hours or beyond for one night’s payment.

Why are check-in and checkout times so standardized? Industry experts say the staff needs time to clean rooms. Because housekeeping employees typically work 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., hotels might need to pay overtime or add shifts to process early check-ins and late checkouts. That’s costly.

Hotels also risk losing revenue if you check out at, say, 8 p.m. – far past the time most guests are willing to check in.

Stay late at many hotels, and you might be charged extra – or not. Hotel practices vary. Hotels might charge a fixed fee or half the daily room rate to guests who overstay their welcome.

At certain hotels it might be getting harder to find flexibility.

Many casino resorts have pushed the check-in time ahead to 4 p.m. and checkouts back to 11 a.m., said Thomas Mueller, director of hotel operations for the Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa in Cabazon, Calif.

Such hotels face unique challenges, he said. Occupancies are high, and stays are short. Get behind on room cleaning, and problems snowball.

Although declining to give a figure, Mueller said a “large percentage” of Morongo’s guests lingered beyond checkout time, “especially if they’re having a good run of luck” at gambling.

That puts pressure on housekeeping. It takes 25 to 90 minutes, depending on the size of the space, to clean each Morongo room or suite, said Rick Baker, executive housekeeper.

Throughout the hotel industry, the trend toward luxury design is also making more work for room cleaners, Mueller and others said. Elaborate bedding and bigger rooms add precious minutes to cleaning chores.

“The trend is more spacious rooms, especially the bathrooms,” said Sean O’Flaherty, Chicago-based vice president of quality assurance for hotels, restaurants and spas for the Mobil Travel Guide, which inspects and rates lodging.

Many of these bathrooms are lined with hard-to-clean marble and loaded with amenities that need to be restocked.

Then there’s the bed.

Westin’s introduction a few years ago of the plush Heavenly Bed set off “an arms race in bedding,” said Lars Negstad, a Chicago-based coordinator in the strategic affairs department of Unite Here, a union representing hotel workers.

High-end hoteliers, he said, try to see “who can throw the most pillows, high-thread-count sheets and duvets at the customer.”

But what’s heavenly for guests can bedevil housekeeping. “All that adds up to more time, more weight, more motion for the staff,” Negstad said.

Despite the pressures, many hotels will accommodate early-arriving and late-departing guests under certain circumstances.

Morongo extends such privileges to customers who “spend an exorbitant amount of money on the gaming floor or in restaurants,” Mueller said.

The Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills will sometimes relax its 3 p.m. check-in, noon checkout rule if it has a room available, said spokeswoman Sarah Cairns. But when I spoke with her recently, she said the hotel, where published rates start at $375 per night, had been sold out the previous six nights.

At Ritz-Carltons, “It’s all about how frequently you are a customer,” said spokeswoman Vivian Deuschl.

It’s common at Ritz hotels to check in at 3 p.m. and check out by noon. But unless the hotel is fully booked, guests should be able to get another hour or so without being charged extra, she said.

So how do a handful of hotels offer so-called 24-hour or flexible checkouts? The answer is usually money – lots of it.

Raffles L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, where published rates start at $468 per night, hasn’t had preset checkout times since it opened in 1998, said Lara Weiss, director of sales and marketing. If you check in at 8 p.m., you can stay until 8 the next night and even beyond, if needed, she said.

If you want early check-in – especially popular with Australians arriving at Los Angeles International Airport soon after dawn – “we will always have a room,” Weiss said. If the hotel is nearly full, it might not be the room you prefer. There are limits to what money can buy.

To make longer stays possible, Raffles has at least one room attendant on duty around the clock. “We can clean rooms at 2 a.m. if necessary,” Weiss said.

And no matter how heavily booked it is, she added, the hotel keeps a few of its 119 rooms vacant “to protect ourselves from the average person who checks out late and to accommodate the walk-in who is the regular, important guest.”

Industrywide, there hasn’t been a rush to 24-hour check-in. In fact, Ritz-Carlton, which once offered this program in Asia, no longer does so, said the Ritz’s Deuschl.

Mobil’s O’Flaherty said he knew of only a handful of hotels, mostly in New York or Beverly Hills, that offered rolling check-in and checkout as a general policy.