The Hotel Industry Created the Karen

Rewards Programs Create Monsters

    The hotel I lived and later worked at was a branded one, under a corporate name. I won't reveal it but think of one of those big three chains. The industry had set standards of rewarding people for their loyalty by giving them benefits, things like discounts, free food, and the like. However, in an attempt to one-up each other every other chain tried to mimic the leading one. Offering their own spin on the loyalty program. 

    These helped retain customers and kept the money coming in from a false sense of comradery between customers and hotels. This loyalty one-upmanship created a cyclical pattern of; staying often, getting a reward, staying more often, and getting a better reward. On top of that, the other companies fought to steal customers with better rewards causing some people who'd been ultra-loyal to one brand to achieve a very coveted status. Most companies call it their Diamond tier or something to that effect. 

 

   This diamond tier in some places can go so far as to favor the "elite" customer over others. One property I worked at (not the one I lived at, a different one) in Twin Falls Idaho forced me to remove a reservation in favor of a diamond-tier member. 

    The other people who'd reserved the reservation with a third party arrived, and I had to walk them to another hotel. The town was sold out, and to top it off they were there for a funeral. If I'm not mistaken, the closest place they found to stay was Mountain Home Idaho which was quite a distance away. If I had to guess they probably wound up staying with family, but it clearly made an already horrible time worse for them.

    

The diamond-tier customer we'd allowed through was an asshole. He was rude, and entitled, demanded free items from our concessions despite that not being a benefit, and overall was just not a good person. So in turn this rewards program at this property rewarded an ass, encouraged him to be an ass, and left a family without a place to stay while also attending a funeral, to top it all off it put me, a nerdy twenty-year-old at the time, in a position to have to tell these people who'd reserved a few days ahead that they couldn't stay there. 

    

I think an interesting misconception is that hotels hold rooms for elite members if they need to stay. They don't, not a single hotel I've been to has done that unless the clerk themselves put it out of order to avoid the headache - which usually could get them in trouble. - No instead, elite members simply remove people who are yet to arrive. 

The loyalty systems that companies spurred have caused people to become much more entitled, very quickly. It transforms once-kind customers into entitled brats. The reason? Because the more often a person stays, the more likely they will request something that either bends the rules or is out of our control as employees to do, and since they're "elite" they expect you to sacrifice your performance at your job to reward them. My main reason for disliking these systems is because it is not only anti-consumer, in regard to the average customer, but also anti-employee by encouraging people to complain and be rude to get their way. Especially since most properties will not allow employees to tell people to stop treating them poorly.

These reward systems make otherwise normal people role-play as if they are wealthy while traveling, and in turn bring out the monster of perceived status brewed from internal classist disdain. Acting entitled is never something that should be rewarded, especially when it's at the expense of other people - employees - or otherwise.

   These rewards systems are becoming more and more common everywhere, and as such most places that involve working with the public have all noticed an even larger increase in entitlement coming from their customer bases. This gradual change will have disastrous effects on our culture the deeper and deeper it seeps into our consumerism. Americans were already incredibly entitled prior to the infectious aspirations of reward systems, now that they pop up everywhere there will be an even more rapid increase in entitlement.

    In conclusion, what I'm trying to say here is; that the Karen was forged in hotels, but her children will spread into your movie theater and Dick's Sporting Goods.

-Pullin