Airport hotels transport, care for distressed travelers

Airport hotels benefit from a fairly steady, built-in customer base, which helps fill rooms but also creates operational issues.

First, an airport hotel must concentrate much more on its transportation. Drivers need a license to pick up guests at the airport. Depending on the municipality, there more than likely is a fee charged by the airport for the opportunity to shuttle guests directly to the hotel. To maintain a steady flow of traffic—and in case of emergencies—an airport hotel needs to build an effective fleet of vehicles.

The Wyndham Miami Airport Hotel & Executive Meeting Center, for example, has eight shuttles of various sizes available and a majority of staff members are trained to drive each.

General manager Robert Lepore said the fleet is necessary to accommodate the distressed airline passenger who has missed a flight or had a flight canceled.

“It happens daily,” Lepore said. “It’s a mix of individual travelers who miss connections to canceled flights, particularly international airlines that don’t have planes sitting around, [or planes with] mechanical problems.”

Lepore said with an airport as large as Miami International, there will be two or three canceled flights a week, which then turns about 200 or 300 people from the airport to the nearest airport hotel.

“When you’re at an airport hotel, you plan for situations that may happen—you won’t know when you’ll get a phone call if there’s a down flight and 200 people are going to show up in an hour.”

From there, customer service is the hotel’s most important asset.

“There’s a lot of frustration with those guests,” Lepore said. “We have the opportunity to take the customer who has experienced the worst of travel and turn it around.”

Be sure to have your sales team communicate your willingness to help distressed travelers to both the airport and the airlines in order to grab that business.