Comment by cpard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpard | Hacker News Reader

From their FAQ:

   "Is it worth the investment?

Absolutely. Hotels equipped with Rest have seen an 84x increase in smoking fine collection. Plus, our smoking detection technology helps prevent damage to rooms and reduce a number of future violations."

Apparently there are way more people smoking than we thought there are or the sensor just generates a lot of false positives.

The language they are using all over the site is very interesting though, see here an example:

From how it works:

"Automatically charge

If smoking is detected, your staff gets notified, simplifying the process of charging smoking fees."

With a system with false positives, it makes total sense to use real time notifications to staff to go and check what's going on, that would be legit, but then on top saying that you automatically charge?

It almost feels like they are selling a way to fraud to their customers while covering themselves against any litigation by using the right copy in there to support that it's the responsibility of the Hotel staff to go and check in real time that the violation is actually happening.

Is there that much smoking in hotels? Do they charge more for smoking rooms?

A number like 84x suggests that it's basically zero now. That kinda makes sense. The only one who would notice is the cleaning staff, and relying on their word for "it smelled like smoke" sounds like a way to get a chargeback. They'd call you on it only if they were forced to take the room out of rotation to air it out.

So maybe there are a lot of people smoking just a little (perhaps a joint), and getting away with it. That might make a number like 84x work.

A number like 84x implies that it's almost entirely false positives.

No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking.

Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.

The hotels don't ever catch people in the act, they just let housekeeping report that the room smells like smoke and they take the fine out of your deposit.

That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.

Leave a $20 for the housekeeper and you won't get reported.

Why wouldn’t they report you? It isn’t like you know who your housekeeper is or that they have any reason to believe you’ll be a repeat guest that will continue to tip them.

They'll happily take the $20 and then report you, because it's their job on the line when the next guest complains that the room smells like shit.

There's no way to conceal cigarette smoke indoors. It's painfully obvious that a room's been smoked in.

Vapes are way lower-key, and as a non-smoker/vaper/etc, unlike cigarettes, someone vaping in a space really doesn't bother me.

> Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.

How? How does this track?

Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide!

If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke. Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it.

If someone smokes in a room and you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low!

The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.

They might be trying to indirectly generate revenue from legal marijuana.

Places like Vegas have a huge amount of recreational sales to tourists. They're clearly smoking the product somewhere, and it's not on the casino floor. One might bet they are engaging in some amount of activity with the potential to generate revenue for the hotel.

This. I've noticed a lot more smoke smell in hotel rooms in the last five years but it's always cannabis -- not tobacco -- in states that have legalized it for purchase but still disallow its use in public spaces.

Eh, just because most people don't report most rule violations... And on the flip side most organizations don't really encourage their employees to report rule violations.

Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.

It doesn’t imply that. I’m pretty sure it is all false positives, but that number does not imply that. It could simply be that only ~1 in 84 smokers was being fined before

A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.

No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”

Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.

Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.

50% reduction in death rate sounds impressive until you find out it’s 3 out of 8 billion people, true.

> No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”

Orthogonal. I said it doesn’t imply it, and it doesn’t. It may suggest it’s likely - and it does - but it does not imply it.

The last time I walked into a hotel room that smelled like cigarette smoke was in 1998, so I would think this is very uncommon.

I had one in 2022. I immediately asked for a different room.

I can't recall the last time. Smoking in the US is way, way down. Not gone, to be sure, but it was crashing even before vapes.

In particular, it’s way, way down among the cohort of the population that have lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms.

Truck drivers and lots of trades crews (e.g. linesmen) stay in hotels all the time. But typically they are not staying at the Hyatt.

There is a whole tier of hotels and other services targeted at the traveling working class which you won't encounter as a highly paid tech professional simply because your company won't book you there.

I chatted with a motel owner in the middle of nowhere, Arizona who made his yearly nut off seasonal melon pickers, usually Mexican nationals on agricultural work visas. They need a place to stay, too. Otherwise, he had the kind of quiet, far out of the way old motel you see in horror movies (which I particularly love) and the odd foreign film set in America.

I ran into traveling road crews (as in CalTrans contractors building highways) visiting a facility for my current employer. Interesting crowd. The pay is good, and the only real requirements seem to be the willingness to wake up early, work hard, and not be insufferable to work with.

When you just need a shower and a bed there's nothing wrong with the old roadside motel, the kind where each room opens directly to the outside and you park right in front of the door. Mostly long gone, though a few remain here and there.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Depends on the pricepoint of the hotel, the cohort with lifestyles amenable to staying in hotel rooms varies from business travel to escorts and drug dealers.

Using an ozone generator you can remove all odors in a medium sized room in less than 30min. Only poorly organized cleaning staff would have this issue.

Which makes me ask why we even need smoking fees then?

I thought it was a little tougher than that? I know it costs at least a few hundred bucks and takes a day or two to ozone a small apartment, which would roughly line up with the $500 fine this hotel charges.

An ozone generator itself doesn't cost much and the only recurring cost is the power it draws, which is also low (dozens of watts).

Last time this happened for me was 2024. Note to self, don’t buy the cheapest hotel possible. It will smell like a blunt wrap.

Come to Vietnam mate.

In last 4 years I've been to rental apartment in Montenegro that left smoke smell on my backpack for multiple days, and in really badly smelling 3-star hotel room in North Macedonia (both in capital cities)

I can't imagine people getting charged by this system not doing chargebacks.

Is there that much smoking in hotels?

Surprisingly, yes. Smoking experienced a significant uptick during COVID.

Post-COVID, a lot of the housekeeping staff wear masks when cleaning guest rooms, so they're not always able to notice the smells that a guest would notice upon first entering the room.

I've had to get 3 out of my last 10 hotel rooms changed because the previous occupant smoked. On my last business trip, this resulted in an upgrade to a suite because they had no more regular rooms available.

I’m fairly certain that most US hotels, you will get complaints from the neighboring rooms about someone smoking. I don’t think you need to rely on the cleaning staff for detection.

I can think of two instances in the last 10 years where I've stayed at a hotel and had my room become disgustingly full of pot smell from someone else in the hotel. So yes, people smoke in hotels.

That said, I haven't smelled _cigarette_ smoke in a hotel in recent memory.

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