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Comment by gunapologist99 | Hacker News Reader

Sending three boxes of t-shirts to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I found out that FedEx actually has an office in the hotel/resort. Fedex wouldn't deliver the boxes to my room for free (which I'd paid for, since I'd put my room number on the address form when shipping), and the office is actually about a half mile away down very long marble-tiled hallways.

The hotel wouldn't let me use one of their hand carts/trolleys (they had to be handled by their bell people), and they wouldn't go with me even for a substantial tip, because they had an agreement with FedEx.

FedEx charged me $150 to deliver the boxes to my room -- more than it'd cost to ship halfway across the country.

This was about ten years ago, so things might be different now.

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> Fedex wouldn't deliver the boxes to my room for free (which I'd paid for, since I'd put my room number on the address form when shipping)

Ship a package to a specific apartment number and there's a 50/50 chance Fedex, UPS or any of the others will deliver it to the front desk / mailroom instead of to the door of that apartment.

For what it’s worth, delivering to the mailroom is typical for NYC doorman residential buildings and probably elsewhere in large buildings.

But those buildings also usually have a trolley and will loan it to you for free.

Yeah, I'm surprised the hotel wouldn't let you use the trolley yourself, every hotel I've ever been in has those trolleys available for any guest to use themselves. Maybe they had unionized bell hops and this policy was to protect their work? Really bizarre that they wouldn't do the work themselves for a heavy tip though.

If FedEx cannot guarantee they can do it then it shouldn't be advertised. Instead they should warn customers at the time of purchase when they won't be able to, or where there is additional cost.

Everything else is false advertising.

So you expect them to keep track of the rules for every building in the world and dynamically adjust at the time of shipment?

Sure, they could do this for buildings they have shipped to within x amount of days, and therefore know the policy. However, that would then leak information to those buildings out to potential thieves.

Yes, I expect they can manage a boolean per building and a notice to users when that's marked.

Thieves likely already know building delivery policies.

> So you expect them to keep track of the rules for every building in the world and dynamically adjust at the time of shipment?

Yeah, this sounds technically possible but wildly impractical.

Which means they shouldn't advertise a capability they know they don't have.

I don't think that letting you put a room or apartment number is the same thing as advertising that they will deliver to the door. By that same logic it would be false advertising to allow you to list a person's name, but not individually hand out packages to the correct people.

It's all the same company; Fedex accepted it for shipment in my state but charged me less than half of what they already knew they'd charge for me to pick it up. In fact, when I said I'd rather just have it returned to sender, they said they'd charge me for that, too (and actually more than the original shipment.)

> by that same logic it would be false advertising to allow you to list a person's name, but not individually hand out packages to the correct people

That's literally what you're paying for if you're shipping to an individual and not a company.

They knew the rules, because they'd set the rules and they were shipping to themselves.

The hotel and the on-site FedEx office both confirmed they had an agreement where FedEx would deliver 'last mile'.

In this case, however, FedEx was the "mailroom", so it can insert itself as a middleman into the convention center shipping.

The hotel and the on-site FedEx office (which was really rude to me) both confirmed they had an agreement where FedEx would deliver 'last mile' (probably literally).

And a bottle of water and large M&M's is $15 at Mandalay Bay.

I'm waiting for my plane to takeoff for Vegas now (weather delay). There's a 32 pack of water in my free checked bag for this reason.

I'm from Phoenix, everyone just carries a refillable water bottle here, I never leave home without it :)

I started using one most of the time this year, but I couldn't remember if bottle refill stations are prevalent on the strip.

The only nice thing I can say about Vegas is that I never had trouble walking up to a business from the sidewalk, asking for a cup of water and getting it for free. I think they didn't want me dropping dead from the heat right in front of them, that'd probably be bad for business.

Granted, that was 15 years ago and things may have changed. If I were made to go back, I'd bring one, maybe two, reusable water bottles and count on filling it myself in my hotel room.

Stock up at the Whole Foods on the strip near the airport! I pick up my car at LAS, stop at the Whole Foods (which also has amazon package delivery), and then drive to my hotel. There's also a Total Wines and a few good restaurants in that mall (Town Square); that and Spring Mountain Road (Chinatown) are the best things about visiting Las Vegas.

If anything changed, it's worse now. Any hotel which has an outsourced package delivery to an "in house business center run by (franchisee of ups/fedex) is generally going to be horrible for package delivery. I generally do Amazon locker (for Amazon), or pick up at a nearby non-hotel fedex/ups location instead, even if it requires taking an uber to it (although I have a rental car in almost all of these cases).

That's definitely what I'm going to do in the future.

Obviously, the real reason why they do this is so that FedEx can get in on that millions-upon-millions of dollars in convention center shipments (as you know, convention centers charge thousands of dollars for literally everything, even wifi or bottles of water.)

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