Cincy Flames tournaments and hotels: our experience has been this: you are mandated to stay in the tournament affiliated hotels, using their code/link. Those rooms are MORE expensive than if booked through other means. The tournament director is pretty ruthless about it. He/his agents have been known to call hotels and verify who is staying there. You may become ineligible to play if it is discovered that you did not book through the tournament. Tournament directors often times get a significant cut from the hotel.
This is true. My son-in-law is GM at a hotel that routinely books blocks of rooms for tournaments/games (baseball only now, but used to do basketball and football until the following happened).
Wife and I were visiting (we're out of state) and they had some type of youth football tournament going on in the area that rooms were blocked at his hotel. He told me they were around $20 markup because of the director block. He got a phone call from his front desk early evening and she had a lobby full of irate parents. Most booked months earlier through the tournament. There was one parent that booked directly last minute at a lower rate. They wanted him to refund directly and give them all the price of the last minute parent. He told the front desk he couldn't, that the director had blocked the rooms at a specific price, that their phone calls should be directed to him. They wouldn't leave the lobby, so I rode with him to the hotel to try straighten it out. It was a madhouse. He explained everything to them, told them there was nothing he could do about it, and to please leave the lobby and take it up with the director. After about 15 minutes, he had to call the police because some were getting physically aggressive. Not a good situation. They just didn't understand he had absolutely nothing to do with it.
He made the decision to not block anything from a certain organization and director, who did both basketball and football. Baseball is a totally different org and director and there is rarely an issue.
The reason I post this is to inform. If someone gets a lower rate at the last minute and outside of the block, it's not the hotel's baby. Don't harass the hotel employees, they have zero to do with it, it's misplaced anger, and quite frankly ignorant if you can't rationally understand how the blocks work. If you have to be angry with someone, talk to the director who blocked the rooms at a specific price. It's done and it's yours at the price you agreed upon.
