Motel 6 is not keeping a light on for its Latino guests.

September 14, 2017 2:46 PM

Two Motel 6 locations are under fire for reporting Latino guests to ICE, resulting in at least 20 deportations.

Per a desk clerk, "We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in. Every morning at about 5 o'clock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE."

These motels were located in Phoenix but the problem may be more widespread (from 2015). Though, Rhode Island sends every guest's name only to the local police. The New York Times mentions this may also be occurring in Washington State.

posted by shoesietart (52 comments total)

Weak-sauce non-apology from Motel 6.

If the employees responsible haven't been terminated and the local franchise owner stripped of the franchise (and all other franchised locations they license), then Motel 6 approves, at least tacitly, of this disgusting behavior.
posted by tclark at 2:55 PM on September 14, 2017 [42 favorites]

I hope there are civil suits that bankrupt these shitty fuckin narcs
posted by Existential Dread at 3:03 PM on September 14, 2017 [14 favorites]

Well, remind me to never stay there again. Hope this hurts them bad. Fucking assholes.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:09 PM on September 14, 2017 [8 favorites]

Also, fuck Phoenix. My least favorite city in the US, right in the middle of my most favorite part of the country. What a hole.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:10 PM on September 14, 2017 [17 favorites]

"We'll turn the light off for ya, amigo..."
posted by jim in austin at 3:13 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

Motel 6 is definitely a business that caters to the working class. It is also a business that is glad to employ undocumented workers. I don't think corporate Motel 6 has anything to gain from this. The motivations for reporting people to ICE are hard to see. It has to be the actions of the front desk people. The $200 reward from ICE, if true, would really clear it all up.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:15 PM on September 14, 2017 [9 favorites]

I've been told by some friends of Bill that all franchise hotels in a certain price range in the San Fernando Valley share their guest registers with LAPD on a daily basis.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:21 PM on September 14, 2017 [8 favorites]

So uh

At what point do comparisons to Nazi Germany become no longer a bit much
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:24 PM on September 14, 2017 [68 favorites]

Aren't hotels required by law to report their guest list to the local police (not to ICE)? Is this just true in some states?
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:25 PM on September 14, 2017

Apparently, the laws exist in some places. They're kind of creepy though. This should be a thing you need a warrant for.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:35 PM on September 14, 2017 [7 favorites]

In some places, pawn shops are required to report on things they've pawned, including the verified identity of the customer.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:49 PM on September 14, 2017

This is so loathsome.
posted by praemunire at 3:52 PM on September 14, 2017 [4 favorites]

Blood on their hands. Cover the buildings in bloody handprints?
posted by runincircles at 3:53 PM on September 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Cooperation with local law enforcement makes a ton of sense, particularly if you're a budget motel chain. I've stayed in a lot of budget motels and stuff from annoying shenanigans to the downright shady happens often enough in this niche that it's perfectly understandable that both the local staff and law enforcement want a nice working cooperative relationship with each other.

There's no similar reasonable justification for a full daily report to ICE, though.
posted by wildblueyonder at 3:55 PM on September 14, 2017 [18 favorites]

This is the Motel 6 which has agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Los Angeles that alleged one of the chain's locations was a base for human traffickers, drug dealers and gang members.
You probably cant talk about Motel 6 without talking about The Blackstone Group, whose CEO and chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman said on Tuesday that despite The New York Times report that he was “outraged” by Trump’s decision to give Nazis and white supremacists a pass, he wasn’t offended in the slightest.
Fortune magazine says that he is the Real Reason CEOs Left Trump’s Councils.
Nazi fuck.
posted by adamvasco at 4:00 PM on September 14, 2017 [19 favorites]

Sure is fun living in what is functionally a surveillance-driven police state. Great job guys, America is definitely great again, we definitely won this one. Never felt more free
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:02 PM on September 14, 2017 [20 favorites]

At what point do comparisons to Nazi Germany become no longer a bit much


That's probably going a bit overboard.


It's more like Vichy France.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:04 PM on September 14, 2017 [39 favorites]

This is exactly what boycotts are for.
posted by Unioncat at 4:04 PM on September 14, 2017 [6 favorites]

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
posted by acb at 4:14 PM on September 14, 2017 [10 favorites]

I have to hand it to you, 2017. Every day I wake up thinking I've seen the worst of human nature I'm likely to see this year, and every day you surprise me yet again with some scintillating new facet of human shittiness.

Really I have to hand it to the American public for stepping up and working toward the Fuhrer here. Abject stupidity and cruelty from this President and this Congress, sure, I've come to expect that. But it's the unsung heroes throughout America, going the extra mile every day to find some way to make someone else's life as shitty as they possibly can. Not because they have to, no. Just because they want to, because that's who we are. We're Americans. It's what we do.

I salute you, Motel 6 and your brave stance on ruining lives. Proud to share this great country with you. And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go drink everything in the house.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 4:15 PM on September 14, 2017 [53 favorites]

If the employees responsible haven't been terminated and the local franchise owner stripped of the franchise (and all other franchised locations they license), then Motel 6 approves, at least tacitly, of this disgusting behavior.

I read somewhere today that the location in Phoenix are corporate-owned.
posted by HiddenInput at 4:15 PM on September 14, 2017

Just canceled a reservation because of this. Literally booked it yesterday. Motel 6's apology is dismal. No business from me for the foreseeable future, or ever. Maybe if they agree to spend real money lobbying for immigrant rights. Half of their money. All their money.
posted by Mister Cheese at 4:16 PM on September 14, 2017 [26 favorites]

I've never once had a good experience at a Motel 6, and it's never my first choice, so I didn't need this as an excuse to never patronize their services again. Good riddance to a chain whose defining characteristic is being 2 less than their main competitor.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:26 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

look, i'm sorry but this is all too much, i am running out of wicker
posted by poffin boffin at 4:42 PM on September 14, 2017 [48 favorites]

So uh

At what point do comparisons to Nazi Germany become no longer a bit much
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:24 PM on September 14 [18 favorites +] [!]

When the government starts institutionally murdering undocumented immigrants en masse, through a documented and official program of slaughter.

Until then, this comparison just serves to convince me that you don't know shit about the Holocaust.
posted by mylittlepoppet at 5:33 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

... uh, you do know that isn't where Nazi Germany started, don't you? The Nuremberg Laws came before concentration camps, and the concentration camps started before the extermination camps.
posted by tavella at 5:39 PM on September 14, 2017 [75 favorites]

When the government starts institutionally murdering undocumented immigrants en masse, through a documented and official program of slaughter.

Until then, this comparison just serves to convince me that you don't know shit about the Holocaust.

Remember that for years prior to the systematic murder of Jews and other "undesirables," Nazi Germany employed registrations, forced migrations, ghettos, etc. They didn't jump straight to mass slaughter. Comparing our current situation to the early Nazi strategies is very relevant.

Or on preview, what tavella said.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 5:41 PM on September 14, 2017 [31 favorites]

My family used to own a Comfort Inn hotel. I haven't been in the hospitality industry for the past 7 years but I had 15 years of experience managing our property with my dad. This is in the Niagara Falls region of Ontario.

We were not required to share any information with the local authorities. No law or anything like that. Occasionally a local police officer would visit and ask us questions. Our policy would be to only share information regarding whether or not an individual had stayed at our property, how long they were here, and their name.

If a police officer asked to speak with a specific guest that was still registered with our hotel, we'd comply as well. But that's about the extent with which we would interact with the authorities.

The only other time we'd deal with the local police is if we had an issue with a guest that was damaging the property, causing a disruption, things of that nature, etc.

What these assholes at the Motel 6 are doing is hurting my brain and my heart. It's disgusting. Preying on people who are vulnerable and at risk, no other way to describe this other than gross. I feel dirty just having read this story. I will not be staying at their chain any time soon.
posted by Fizz at 5:43 PM on September 14, 2017 [14 favorites]

Okay so there are a few things to untangle in this morass of evil racist shitfuckery.

1.) There's no way for hotel staff to tell whether someone is an undocumented worker, an overstayer, a foreign national visiting for the night, someone whose last name is Chavez, or any other damn thing. So that means they're engaged in racial profiling wherein if you're brown, speak Spanish, or have a hispanic surname they will tip off ICE. Like I stayed in Phoenix twice over the last two years in hotels and used my New Zealand passport as ID. I doubt like fuck that my NZ ID'd, german surnamed, english speaking ass raised any eyebrows or caused occasion for ICE to be contacted. So evil, and also racist as fuck.

2.) Gosh I'm sure that the Motel 6 chain never employs undocumented workers to be, for example, housekeeping staff and then pays them cash under the table at both less than minimum wage and also avoiding federal witholdings etc. which serves the dual evil racist as fuck purpose of saving the franchise money and disempowering vulnerable workers who would be too afraid to report abuse like wage theft or sexual harassment to anyone. I'm sure that never ever happens, and so ergo does not make Motel 6 hypocrites as well as being evil and racist as fuck.

3.) Here is the email address for guest relations at Motel 6 ([e-mail]). Please consider dropping Motel 6 an email explaining how they have lost business with you, your friends and family, corporate travel, etc because of their actions as reported on in the Phoenix New Times. Feel quite free to call them evil and racist as fuck if this makes your day sweeter.

4.) And here are links to the profiles of the two reporters responsible for the story Antonia Noori Farzan and Joseph Flaherty. Please consider dropping them an email or a tweet in support of the great journalistic work they've done.

5.) Here is a link to Mayor Stanton's contact page, here is the contact information for the Phoenix City Council, and here is the contact information for the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. Please consider dropping all of the above a line to protest what's been going on in local businesses in Phoenix, asking all of them to make a public statement condemning the actions of the Motel 6 staff, and possibly asserting that you would be hesitant to visit or do business in a city that doesn't protect vulnerable populations, or whatever as applicable and as the spirit takes you.

6.) Lastly please consider donating generously to puffin boffins fund to build a bigger wicker man, or several wicker men, or to explore vast new planets of wicker because there are some evil racist as fuck people in this world.
posted by supercrayon at 5:49 PM on September 14, 2017 [50 favorites]

Apparently, the laws exist in some places. They're kind of creepy though. This should be a thing you need a warrant for.

According to Wikipedia that law was found to be unconstitutional after it went before SCOTUS: City of Los Angeles v. Patel.
posted by XMLicious at 5:49 PM on September 14, 2017 [8 favorites]

Wow, this is disgusting. I can't remember the last time I stayed at a Motel 6, which is strange because I've stayed at plenty of Super 8s. They're usually pretty decent, if no-frills. So I guess, if anybody finds themselves looking for a budget motel that isn't run by unbelievable assholes, try Super 8.
posted by gueneverey at 6:13 PM on September 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

To me, one of the lessons of this is that a whole lot of us are going to be asked to be directly complicit in the racist surveillance state, and we need to be ready for it. We need to think about what information we have that might be useful to ICE or other agencies, and we need to have a plan for what we'll do if the government or our bosses demand that we turn it over. We need to think about whether there are ways to fudge things to protect vulnerable people. We need to consider what kind of records we're keeping and if there are ways not to document things that can be used to hurt vulnerable folks. You don't have to be a cop or an ICE agent to be part of this, and we all need to make sure that we're prepared so we don't get caught off guard when it's our turn.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:19 PM on September 14, 2017 [52 favorites]

Two Motel 6 locations are under fire for reporting Latino guests to ICE

I misread that as "on fire" and I thought, "Harsh, but just."
posted by octobersurprise at 6:58 PM on September 14, 2017 [14 favorites]

look, i'm sorry but this is all too much, i am running out of wicker

Have you considered rattan?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:22 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

There's no way for hotel staff to tell whether someone is an undocumented worker, an overstayer, a foreign national visiting for the night, someone whose last name is Chavez, or any other damn thing. So that means they're engaged in racial profiling wherein if you're brown, speak Spanish, or have a hispanic surname they will tip off ICE. Like I stayed in Phoenix twice over the last two years in hotels and used my New Zealand passport as ID. I doubt like fuck that my NZ ID'd, german surnamed, english speaking ass raised any eyebrows or caused occasion for ICE to be contacted. So evil, and also racist as fuck.

So, yeah - but also:

“We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in,” one front-desk clerk explained. “Every morning at about 5 o’clock, we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE.”

So, I don't know if you were overstaying a visa or otherwise on an ICE list. But this quote suggests that the specifically racist evil fuckery might be happening at the ICE level rather than at the hotel desk. If your New Zealand ID'd, German surnamed ass showed up on the list of motel guests and matched to one of ICE's "this person should not be here" lists, and they ignored it in favor of Manuel Rodriguez-Juarez - well, that's not only racist fuckery, but possibly illegal racial profiling by the feds. (Please note that this scenario posits only that the specifically racist aspect of things might be happening somewhere other than at the front desk. The evil fuckery of sharing the list with ICE in the first place is not mitigated by that.)

On the other hand, the article talks about how Mr. Rodriguez-Juarez was arrested six hours after checking in. Now, maybe he checked in at midnight, the desk clerk pushed the button at 5 AM, and an hour later ICE was on site; we don't know enough from the article to say. But it seems at least as possible that the desk clerk took the initiative to contact ICE outside the normal reporting schedule - in which case your description of them as evil and also racist as fuck is right back on.

My hunch is that there's plenty of racism and evil on both ends of that phone call, but we can't (with certainty) pin it on (solely) the front desk clerk based just on what's presented. Personally, I wouldn't mind a bit if evidence that ICE was ignoring white New Zealanders in favor of deporting Latinos came to light in a way that could result in legal action and some meaningful consequences for the agency and its staff.
posted by nickmark at 7:25 PM on September 14, 2017

ArbitraryAndCapricious, you have a really good point. I go into a lot of people's houses for my job and I'm taking pictures the whole time I'm in there. It's worth considering how the information I'm collecting could be misused. It's worth having a plan for what to say, just in case. It seems pretty remote that such a plan should have to be enacted… but so did a lot kf things, just a few years ago.

It's a scary, scary time to be a Latinx immigrant in the US.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:27 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

It also means that information on ALL guests was turned over. To what purpose? Where is that information being kept? If you're married but fooling around, is your information in the hands of someone who shouldn't have it and might use it against you at some point?
posted by etaoin at 7:44 PM on September 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

If it was genuinely unauthorized, I think Motel 6 could sue its employees for unauthorized use of confidential information. I mean, that's probably what they'd do if an employee sold guest records to a Super 8 or whatever. It gets a bit more complicated if the person behind it t is a franchisee, but the principle is the same: whoever owns the information has a case against the person who sold it - and probably whoever bought it. I think that failing to sue would be solid evidence of complicity.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:08 PM on September 14, 2017 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the info, supercrayon. Motivated me to write Motel 6 and the reporters. Currently thinking about what should go into an e-mail to the Phoenix city council. I'll admit that I stopped writing to my members of Congress in June. I don't know why this sort of thing feels more personal than Trump axing DACA. I mean, I'm the grandchild of immigrants! Maybe because I expect Trump to be terrible.

But damnit, if I can't write a continuous stream of angry e-mails to companies, the government, or whoever deserves it... what have I spent the last eleven years on MetaFilter for?
posted by Mister Cheese at 9:31 PM on September 14, 2017 [5 favorites]

"We send a report every morning to ICE — all the names of everybody that comes in."

Stasiland
posted by Mister Bijou at 12:37 AM on September 15, 2017 [5 favorites]

I've worked in hotels a long time, and the daily sending of guest records sure sounds like a clear violation of the law, but it is a bit unclear in regards to who the weight of the violation falls on.

There are instances where hotel owners have been, essentially, forced to supply records of their guests to law enforcement when their property has had a history of problems. The local authorities will then make a deal with the hotel to provide the info in order to reduce incidents of drug dealing, prostitution, trafficking, or whatever. These sorts of guest record searches have been found to be illegal (but with some remaining vague areas) from what I understand, and the Motel 6 sending guest records situation seems entirely consistent with the rulings stating this is a violation of guest rights.

Either ICE or the hotel owners demanded or volunteered the exchange of guest information without consent and/or direct individual concern. The process of sending this information automatically required both parties to set up some sort of information sharing system, making it clear that this isn't an employee led initiative, but one either from ICE or the owner of the hotel. Motel 6 may or may not be aware of the actions of this individual owner, but they could have had some involvement as well, which wouldn't surprise me given the chain, but which I wouldn't take for granted in this instance. None of that is to suggest the owner of the hotel should be freed from penalty, but that ICE may have been the ones initiating the exchange which the owner might have felt necessary to go along with to keep their business.

As to the individual case regarding Rodriguez-Juarez, that could have been a front desk agent acting on their own or the result of information sent automatically, so I'd hesitate to place full blame without knowing more about the specifics. In many places hotel front desk clerks are often young, inexperienced, and uninformed on the complexities of hotel law, so this may have been an instance where the ownership misled the employee as to the demands of the law. Hotel ownership, even in chains, is usually a franchisee arrangement, where the owners of the hotels may act with enormous variation as to how they choose to run their hotels and their familiarity or concern with the laws.

While this is all disgusting to me as someone who works in the hotel industry, I will also add that there is some uncertainty around areas of guest information for individual requests by the police, so while this situation is absolutely unacceptable, people should be aware that there are areas where the sharing of some information with police on individuals may occur, but that cooperation with police must fall within certain defined limits.

A hotel employee should never allow anyone including the police into a guest's room without their consent or a warrant other than for housekeeping or maintenance purposes. Once the room is past due to be vacated though the police may be let in to search the room with some occasional exceptions. The hotel should never give over a guest register to the police to browse for names, but if the police ask for a specific guest then the hotel will generally tell the police whether a person under that name is registered or not. Hotels should never give out room keys to anyone not registered to the room (which has personally brought me a great deal of grief over the years, including an incident with the then deputy attorney general to the state who wanted a key to his wife's room, which I wouldn't provide).

Hotels in many states must by law collect some specific information from guests checking in to the hotel, such as names, addresses, and phone numbers, and this information must be stored for some length of time. The hotels I've worked at have stored guest registration cards and payment information for seven years for the most part, though with computer systems the cards themselves aren't the most significant piece of info other than holding the signature, so records may be presumed to be held indefinitely now.

Many, perhaps even most, hotels now do demand credit cards or significant deposits and may photo copy IDs for their own protection, so paying cash doesn't alleviate the identification requirements, if the hotel accepts it at all without a credit card on file as many do not. Some employees, however, may be more lax on verifying address info and phone numbers can be made up, so if you want to avoid connecting your name to an address tell the clerk its changed since the ID was made and they'll enter the "new" info instead. Phone numbers generally aren't going to be verified either unless there is reason to believe there is some connection to a crime involved, such as prostitution, so giving out a wrong one isn't going to cause problems unless you need to be contacted later.

There are also a host of best practices one might want to be aware of, but those aren't necessarily quite the same as legal concerns for the most part, so it'd be straying even a bit further from the post, so I'll leave it there.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:49 AM on September 15, 2017 [14 favorites]

gusottertrout, I hear what you are saying that the actual front desk employees might not be the ones who came up with the plan (and in fact are likely not), but the fact is they made an active choice to push a button transmitting guest information to ICE, and received a reward per head, and that makes them morally complicit. People above have made comparisons to the Nuremberg Laws and Vichy France, which I think are absolutely apt, but we Americans can look a lot closer to home for examples of individuals being systematically rewarded for being amoral shitheads. Did these people fall asleep in the part of third-grade history class where we learned that this was wrong?

(I had originally thought of the Fugitive Slave Act, but I think that's morally different in that it required penalized Northerners for not reporting runaway slaves, rather than rewarded those who reported. That's probably coming, though.)
posted by basalganglia at 4:26 AM on September 15, 2017

Sorry, I don't want to go on about this, but I'm really furious. One thing that really irks me on top of everything else is that undocumented workers are as close to an ideal set of guests one can imagine from a hotel perspective.

In close to thirty years of working in hotels, in, I grant, white dominant areas, I've never, ever, not once had to kick out or call the police over a person of color getting too far out of line. It isn't that I'm living in some dreamworld where I believe people of color are angels that never cause problems, there's been the usual noise complaints, drug use, homeless people trying to camp out secretly in the hotels and so on, and I'm sure in minority majority areas, there are many occasions where worse occurs, but the worst problems I've ever had to deal with came from white self-satisfied jerks who would be exactly the sort to think turning in people to ICE is a swell idea.

Their the ones beating up their girlfriends, threatening hotel staff, refusing to stop partying, trying to break into rooms "for reasons", and generally making obscene or aggressive demands. They don't give a shit if you call the cops because it doesn't mean much to them, there's no real threat involved more important than abusing the woman they came in with. Undocumented workers are the least likely group to want to deal with the police or cause any problems that might lead to police being called. Any hotel should welcome guests like that with open arms, but these assholes decided to work with ICE instead. I mean, fuck, I've had more troubles with unruly border guards than I have the many Latinx workers who've stayed at the hotel.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:14 AM on September 15, 2017 [13 favorites]

Now that I've calmed down a little, though not much, and thought about this some more, it seems to me to be entirely likely that this is an ICE led initiative and would almost certainly have to include at least a plan for the involvement of many hotels to make such a system worth implementing if the article is indeed correct about the transmission of the guest ledger being a one button operation. I'm no expert on computer systems or on the limits of legality for ICE, but this wouldn't fly for local police anywhere I've worked and the simplicity of the system suggests something more is involved.

It seems unreasonable to believe ICE would set up a such a system of reporting for just two hotels or that they would otherwise have a way for such a system to be set up at the request of a couple hotel owners. Instead, my belief is that any system such as was vaguely described by the article would be one where the automatic reporting would have to interface with the hotel interface directly, likely requiring some assistance from the hotel system owners, Motel 6, if that was, as is common, a proprietary interface. ICE would then ask or tell owners they could or must send guest info to ICE and likely receive a bounty for any hits. The bounty would almost assuredly go to the owner of the hotel for being an automated system, though the owner could certainly reward employees for sending the info as well, but that seems less likely as anyone willing to sell their guests out for cash is someone greedy enough to keep it for themselves.

ICE must either believe it has the authority to demand that information, which may in fact not be entirely wrong given the 100 mile border concept and unclear definition of power they seem to enjoy without sufficient government oversight or control, or they are continuing to engage in purposeful overreach of their powers. Either way, it seems likely they are, at the least, not only welcoming the initiative by providing the technical ability necessary for it to work, they are quite possibly pushing the initiative on hotel owners, some of whom, it seems are welcoming it willingly. Perhaps the Motel 6 system isn't proprietary, can be accessed without much complication, or the information is sent in some other form like a fax or simple spreadsheet and the article is misleading, but right now I have to believe this is a bigger issue than a couple hotels and may constitute another instance of gross overreach and possible legal violation by ICE, the Motel 6 chain, and the hotel owners involved.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:24 AM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

I used to provide technical support for Motel 6 and other motel/hotels. I'm betting that they've changed their software after the sale to the Blackstone Group. All the same, of all the software I've seen, I can't for the life of me work out what "we do the audit and we push a button and it sends it to ICE." means. What button? Who set it up? Is it simply an email? Every bit of front desk software I've ever worked on doesn't have access to external email. They're all walled off and usually written in some version of Unix or DOS or maybe early Windows. If this is a corporate Motel 6 and not a franchise, if something were to happen to any of their systems it's likely tech support would wipe and reinstall. Who sets "the button" back up after?

I know there are far bigger questions, but I just can't get past the logistics. Someone knows a lot more than they're saying.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:03 AM on September 15, 2017 [7 favorites]

G6 Hospitality has lots of chest-puffing on its website about their world-class cloud-based inventory and revenue management systems.

If the night auditor simply has to "push a button", it's in the software. Which is in the cloud. Which means the Phoenix locations are using the same software as everyone else. Yeah, maybe only those franchise logins get The Button, and maybe donkeys will sprout wings and fly today. This is corporate policy and it's not just Phoenix.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:17 AM on September 15, 2017 [1 favorite]

(And not just Motel 6, either, if ICE is in the software integration business now.)
posted by Lyn Never at 8:22 AM on September 15, 2017

And they're not franchise, they're corporate - franchise would be much easier to understand, they have all sorts of exemptions and weird software builds. However, if this were happening at all corporate locations- if everyone had whatever this button is, we'd be seeing it all over the place once the story broke - people talking about working at Motel 6 and more about what this entails. I guess there could be a computer whiz at the locations - or even ICE themselves? - wrote up some sort of macro? Maybe they run the audit, exist the software, hit the macro, and it sends? But that still doesn't really pass the sniff test.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:32 AM on September 15, 2017

I can almost guarantee that home office at some capacity knew about this, though. It stretches belief that no one has ever mentioned it in a tech support call. You can get some bored tech support agents, but at some point - especially if 'the button' stopped working - someone would ask what it was and how it got there.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:38 AM on September 15, 2017

I guess there could be a computer whiz at the locations - or even ICE themselves? - wrote up some sort of macro?

But could ICE do that without essentially hacking Motel 6 software? Even they can't believe that'd be legal.

I guess the auditor could have meant "do the audit" to be including the creation of separate reports, which could then be sent to ICE. But, at best, that would mean making some sort of copy of the in-house guest list, but i have no idea how they'd do that in anything like a one button process since that clearly doesn't imply email.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:46 AM on September 15, 2017

Oh if ICE did it, I figure the manager lets them on the computer. Or the manager does it because they get some sort of kickback? But that doesn't explain two locations and only two locations.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:54 AM on September 15, 2017

"Pushing a button" could be some kind of macro that pulls down the list of guests names and generates an automated email. I don't think it's a full on software system from Motel 6 to ICE. At least I hope not.
posted by shoesietart at 9:07 AM on September 15, 2017