Joe and I have been friends with Stephan and Emilio for years. But besides the friendship, Stephan, in particular, has been a longtime reader of Your Mileage May Vary. He’s mentioned here and there how some pieces of our advice have helped them with some of their travels. He’s also told us that our list of hacks of how to override electronic hotel thermostat settings has been of particularly good use, here and there.
I was text messaging with Stephan the other day. He and Emilio are going to Hawaii next month, and Stephan told me how he got round-trip flights (they live in southeast Florida) and a week at the Royal Hawaiian for a really good price. “JetBlue standard to LAX with points. American First to HNL with points/travel bank. Then Delta ONE for the return on points (through JFK). Yay miles/points!” was his exact quote. Yeah, he did a good job. 🙂
After I suggested they try to get reservations at the place that may have been our best meal of 2022 (it’s in Honolulu), we started reminiscing about the time, a couple of years ago, they were staying at a hotel in Central Florida and essentially broke their hotel room, thanks to some advice I had given. 😉 I posted about this in the past, but it’s a good story worth repeating, so…
The two of them were staying at a Marriott property. Stephan and I were texting back and forth about some people we mutually knew, when the conversation took quite the turn…
To make the above a little more clear: when he said the room was too cold, I told him to check out our post about how to hack hotel thermostats. Our list doesn’t include every single thermostat out there, but it has a lot. Unfortunately, it apparently didn’t have the one he needed, because when he sent me a pic of the thermostat in his room, I could see it wasn’t on my list.
Hmmm…
So I did some Googling, found a video to override it, and sent him the link:
But then he said:
Well, I’ll tell you what happened. Nothing good.
About 5 or 10 minutes later, Stephan wrote back:
He was only saying that in fun, but I still felt guilty for bringing him down this path to begin with. Oh crap. Oh crap. Oh crap…
And then came the moment of truth:
(and a blog post he has now become, albeit several months later, LOL)
Anyway, Stephan was quiet for a while and then wrote back:
Pause…..pause…..
And then an update!
Hooligans indeed. And never trust fly-by-night travel blogs 😉
About an hour I got one more message from him:
They checked out the next morning using the app. They didn’t mention the issue. As Stephan said, “I broke it, it fixed itself. ‘Even Steven’ in my book.” They never heard anything from the hotel about it, either.
But it just goes to show you – even though there are directions on how to hack a thermostat, even if there are links that tell you exactly how to do it, even if they’re FROM US (or some other fly-by-night travel blog) ;-), you’re ALWAYS doing it at your own risk.
Fortunately, Stephan and Emilio did not go to hotel jail. We thank them for their friendship and for allowing us to share their (edited for blog use) story.
Feature Image: Telkonet
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
1 comment
“F” on AA to HNL out of LAX? How much did he spend for that? Those are just the wide seats with some extra legroom.