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My son and I are in the midst of a weeklong trip mostly in Denmark and Belgium, but I’ve been trying to keep things rolling on the blog while we’re away.  We stayed 1 night at the Marriott Copenhagen, and while I will have a full review coming up shortly, I did want to make one quick comment about the check-in procedure

Lying about “upgrades”

One of my travel pet peeves is when front desk agents give me an “upgrade” that is not really an upgrade. I mean, it’s really not the end of the world, though I will admit to being occasionally whiny about getting upgraded.  But when I’m traveling by myself, or just a few kids, even a standard room is fine.  The things I truly “care” about are

  • Most importantly – Lounge access, if applicable
  • Much less importantly – Good views / high floors

a building with trees and cars parked on the side

Checking in at the Marriott Copenhagen

Due to all of the madness with the combination of the Marriott / Starwood loyalty programs, I checked in to the Marriott Copenhagen as a Marriott Platinum, which is a mid-tier status (requires 50 nights). The list of benefits says “We’ll do our best to upgrade your room (including Select Suites), based on availability at check-in. Upgrades are subject to availability identified by each hotel and limited to your personal guest room.”

My “upgrade”

I had booked a regular room, but asked if there were any upgrades available.  I was told that because of my Platinum status, I was upgraded to a room with “a view of Tivoli Gardens“.  Ooh… sounds nice!

But wait, rooms with city views (like views of Tivoli Gardens) are not as desirable as waterfront rooms.  Marriott’s own website says so – here are the prices for the 2 rooms on a random weekday

a screenshot of a hotel room

(As an aside, this was a pretty good use of 40,000 Marriott points – 2800DKK is USD$436, so over 1cpp for Marriott points which is definitely on the high side of value I get for Marriott points)

But back to the point – Marriott is charging nearly USD$60 / night more for these waterfront rooms, so don’t go trying to tell me that a city view room is better than a waterfront view.

In the end it didn’t really matter – we weren’t in our room very much and we had access to the executive lounge, so it’s all good.  It’s just so irritating when hotel front desk agents pretend to give upgrades

What about you?  Does this ever happen to you? Am I making too big of a deal of it? Leave your thoughts in the comments


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