2025 Q1 Hotel Committee Update

Greetings from your Hotel Committee,

Last week we had our quarterly hotel meeting with travel and I want to give everyone an update on what has been going on system wide hotel and travel-wise.

1) Sunseeker Resort

The company has continued to get a commitment from Sunseeker management to give any TDY or VBD crews staying in Sunseeker a space-available upgrade to the sun suites. This will be done in seniority order for all long stay crews. Single overnight stays are not eligible for the courtesy upgrade. Keep in mind this also means you can be downgraded if the resort somehow sells out and they need the space for revenue guests.

2) PUJ Overnights for CVG and PIT crews.

As you might have seen in the company communication, in order to improve schedule reliability we have begun to run the PUJ trips out of CVG and PIT as overnights. The first crew will be DH down to PUJ the night before and operate the flight home. The second crew will operate the flight down that morning and then DH home. Currently this is showing as a DH home the following day for some reason. There are many flights out that same day as well as the chance that you could be DH on our own company aircraft if there are seats available. I do not have any commitments from travel, however I feel that this second crew would have a good chance of getting home same day in most cases.
I have tried over and over to get an all-inclusive as our primary hotel in PUJ but as we are advisory only, I have not been able to force that as of yet. Currently the primary hotel is the 4 points located 5 minutes from the airport. The pros of this property is the proximity to the airport, and the food is relatively inexpensive. The cons are it is not all inclusive and it is not on the beach. Also in the past this hotel did NOT give us Marriot points. The secondary hotel is the Westin. This is a top notch 4 star hotel and in my opinion the best hotel we stay in regularly system wide. The pros are the proximity to the airport (5 mins as well) and excellent food, as well as being on the beach itself. The cons are that it is very expensive. Unless you have decent status with Marriot in order to get free breakfast, be prepared to pay over $50 for breakfast and much higher for dinner. In the past this hotel DID give us points.
The 3rd level hotels are a mix of all-inclusive resorts I vetted but these are few and far between and I would not expect getting one of them except in rare occasions. There is one “Do Not Book” hotel that I have made Travel aware of. If you get booked into the AC by Marriot (Barcelo) please ask to be moved. In my opinion this is not a safe option as it has no external security and is located in a not so nice location.
Also mentioned in that company communication was the SNA overnights for PVU crews. As of yet I have not been told what hotel we are using there. If you end up on one of these overnights and the hotel is unacceptable please reach out to the hotel committee so we can get involved.

3) Hotel Incidentals

As a crew member you are never required to put your own credit card down in order to check into a hotel. In order to allow this the company has to state that they will cover all charges when booking the room. Occasionally you will have a desk agent tell you that all charges are covered when checking in. This is NOT the case. The company is not responsible for any charges beyond the room rate itself. If you would like to put food and drink (or anything else) you will need to provide your own card for those incidentals. If you do this, please verify at checkout that the room was put on the company card and only the incidentals were put on your personal card.

If you have any further questions or concerns please reach out to your hotel committee at hotel@apa2118.org.

Matt Timpany
AAY Hotel Committee Chair