Hard-to-find phone number, bait-and-switch
reviewed Jan. 2, 2007, Feb. 25, 2008
January 2007 report
Many hotel websites put their phone number up in
big bold letters, on every page of their site, to make it
easy for potential guests to make reservations. The
Stratosphere Hotel does the opposite, doing a pretty good
job of hiding their phone number! It's not on
their home page. There's no "Contact" link anywhere on
the page. And, amazingly, even clicking "Reservations"
doesn't show you a phone number! Neither does "Make a
Reservation", or even "Inquire about a reservation".
Incredible. We stayed elsewhere.
February 2008 report
In June of last year a reader alerted us that
the Strat had finally seen fit to make its phone number
findable, so we moved them into the "Fixed" section. But
it didn't take long before they broke their site again.
We now note a whole host of problems:
- The phone number is gone from the front page
again. Even better, the phone number isn't even on
their Contact page. Brilliant! The Stratosphere
makes their number so hard to find, people actually
come to our site by searching Google for
"Stratosphere phone number". (Speaking of that, let me
make it a little easier to find than even the
Stratosphere does: Their reservations number is 800-99-TOWER.
Anyway, when people leave your site and go to
Google to find your retail phone number, that's
when you know your site truly has a problem.
- Time-wasting Flash animation on the front
page. Not only do you have to wait for it to load,
if you go to another page and then hit the Back
button, you get to wait for it to load again.
Nice.
- Because of Flash, it's impossible to bookmark
the Reservations page.
- Bait-and-switch. Clicking on "Specials
& Packages" in the menu you see a deal that looks
quite attractive: Sign up for their player's club
("Ultimate Rewards") and as part of the "New Member
Bonus Program" get a package deal which includes a
guest room or suite. My friend signed up, dutifully
giving up all her personal info, but after signing up
there was zero clue as to how to actually claim the
advertised package deal.
- More Bait-and-switch. Go to the "Thrills"
page. Notice the plug for their "Lowest Rate
Guarantee". Click it. And, surprise, surprise, you get
zero information about any lowest rate guarantee. All
you get is a booking form. (After you wait for the
unnecessary Flash to load, that is.)
Thrill ride fiascos
 In
digging around, I found the Stratosphere's problems go
well beyond a broken website. Those problems are so
egregious I decided to list them here, even though they
have nothing to do with a problem website. (Well, in a
sense they do, because they're both the result of bad
management.)
For example, in two separate incidents, guests were
left dangling a sixth of a mile above the Las Vegas
Strip when rides on the top of the tower unexpectedly
shut down. This would be forgivable if the Stratosphere
dealt with the situations responsibly, but they
didn't.
In April 2005, a month after the "Insanity" ride
opened, an 18- and an 11-year-old girl were stranded
on the ride, dangling 906 feet above the Strip for 80
minutes when the ride shut down because of high winds
which reached 61 miles per hour. You would think the
safest thing to do when the high winds start batting the
ride around would be to bring the ride back in and let
the riders get off the damn thing. You might think it
would be more dangerous to leave them precariously
hanging over the edge in super-high winds. But not
according to the Stratosphere. A Stratosphere spokesman
actually had the gall to say that the ride "worked
exactly as it should." Wow. A more responsible company
might apologize profusely and promise that in the future
riders would be brought back promptly when there are high
winds. But that's exactly what the Stratosphere did
not do.
It didn't end there. One of the riders, Erica
McKinnon, said that workers
in the booth were laughing at them while they were
stuck out on the ride. And what kind of compensation did
the Stratosphere offer the aggrieved riders? A free
one-year pass for the ride! It's hard to think of a
stupider response.
You might think that after this experience, the
Stratosphere would be better prepared the next time
something like this happened and would handle it
better. But no. Later that same year, six Japanese
tourists were stranded on a different ride, X-Scream, for
90 minutes when the power went out. According to the news
report, the ride was equipped with a manual override to
bring the riders back in the event of a power outage, but
a Strat spokesman "could
not explain why the tourists weren't returned to safety
until power came back on." Nice.
Refusal to pay winnings
Michael Shackleford, a well-known gambling
mathematician and former university professor, says that
the Stratosphere refused to honor an expired sports
ticket. Though the ticket was expired, he says it's
customary for Las Vegas sportsbooks to honor expired
tickets anyway, and in fact knows of no cases in which
they didn't. He says that the Strat is refusing to pay
for no other reason than that they can. As a result,
after running his website Wizard of Odds for 11 years, in
2008 the Strat became the first land casino to be named
on his "Vegas
blacklist".
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