Travelodge: The New ‘Blind Date’ Scheme

 

Followers of the now somewhat notorious hotel chain may have noted an item in the news recently regarding several instances of occupied room keys being issued in error to unauthorised persons.

Rumours abound as to why this might have happened, citing lax hotel security policy, poor staff training, etc. However, an interesting alternative explanation surfaced recently on social media, based on the possibility that this 'lapse' wasn’t actually a mistake after all….

The theory advanced by its proponents is that in attempt to spice up their hotel offering, Travelodge’s Marketing Development Department (TMDD) have come up with a ‘blind date’ type scheme whereby rooms occupied by single travellers are selected at random and a surprise additional occupant, also selected at random, is issued with a second pass key. Presumably neither 'victim' is aware of what the hotel (or fate!) has in store for them....

This scheme is apparently designed to ‘make life more interesting’ for the unwitting participants and encourage lonely single travellers to ‘interact more’, thus making their stay more memorable and hence likely to promote re-bookings and improve Travelodge's market share. If successful it would also increase profit per room, with two people paying for the same room at single rates. There was even talk of hiring a celebrity to 'compere' the most noteworthy initial meetings, with video footage streamed live - sadly Cilla is no longer available, and a suitable alternative personality could not be persuaded to take the job....

Reactions to the pilot scheme were confidently expected by management to be generally positive once the ‘ice was broken'....for most pairings. In the unlikely event of complaints  from either of the participants, these would be smoothed over by sympathetic reception staff with a profuse apology for the ‘mistake’ and the offer of a free extra night’s stay for any ‘particularly difficult’ customers (presumably the celebrity compere would still receive their fee).

Needless to say, if the scheme was indeed pre-planned, management will have been a little disappointed with the reactions so far, and will be particularly aggrieved at their 'bad luck' in selecting a victim of domestic abuse for the pilot…and then managing to team them up with none other than.....their abuser.

How much credibility should we give to this particular rumour ? I couldn't possibly comment....

Questioned about the incident with the ‘rogue’ robotic vacuum cleaner that went AWOL in 2022, a Travelodge spokesman reported that “…we’ve not had any more issues with our cleaner robots escaping since we locked them all up at nights, although one or two have mysteriously disappeared from our storage cupboards. This is still a big improvement compared with our human cleaners who manage to escape much more frequently than that nowadays. 

We think the cleaning staff may have removed the missing robots to prevent them threatening their jobs, although they all deny this (the humans that are left, that is). We have looked at our CCTV footage, but this seems to show occasional unexplained time gaps during nightime hours which we can't account for…to our knowledge, none of our cleaners have any expertise as hackers, so we're at a loss to explain this”.

The 2022 'escape' incident sparked considerable interest at the time in the possibility of an AI ‘super intelligence’ hiding in plain sight within some robotic vacuum cleaners, and still defies explanation to this day. A GCHQ spokesman offered a 'no comment' verdict recently on the possibility than Beijing might have built in an AI 'back door' to the microelectronics controlling these devices, making them capable of information-gathering for CCP. 

The plot thickens....

First published 10.8.26; Revised 31.8.26