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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

How many pay with cash at a hotel?

I'd expect it to be very low — large bills, often paid for by a company credit card or in advance online.

For the hotel bill itself, I agree that most people will pay via credit card, but I've seen plenty of people paying cash for incidentals at the front desk (snacks, drinks, etc) as well as at the hotel restaurant/bar.

There are plenty of times people who are traveling do not want a digital record of their payments for things such as alcohol or "food for two"

Why would anyone want a digital record of any of their payments? By default?

EDIT: I should have clarified that I was thinking of a digital record in someone else’s possession. Having a record of your own transactions yourself could certainly be useful.

One reason is to load it into their employers expense system for reimbursement... My company credit card expenses automatically show up in our expense system for easier expense reporting.

Another reason is so I can audit the charges -- if my credit card had an option for "Don't track individual purchases", I wouldn't use it since I want to look at the charges at the end of the month and make sure they were mine.

Going even farther, I'd love it if full receipts passed through the credit card system. Yes, my credit card company would mine the data, but replacing "$20 at FOOCORP on 11/23" with "$20 at FOOCORP on 11/23 <click for receipt>" would be well worth it to me.

(I wrote up something advocating this in https://www.jefftk.com/p/attach-receipts-to-credit-card-tran...)

There's a startup or two doing that in the UK (can't recall the names), but if course it only works for shops that are on board and use a till system that supports it.

The functionality exists, and many receipts already do get uploaded into the credit card network. It’s called “Level 3” transaction data.

This is especially true for air travel, where ticket details are almost always attached to the charge. However, I’ve started seeing it done at some large online merchants as well (e.g. Amazon). It’s typically used for expense tracking on corporate p-cards.

It’s rare to see the additional details displayed for consumer accounts, but the data is there on the backend.

I'm onboard. The amount of time I have to mess with receipts is a pain, all for reimbursement. And on the other side are receipts I never had any use for, which get tossed in the trash immediately.

Johnny555 makes some good points, but I think the focus here is on the case where someone ordinarily ambivalent about digital purchase records specifically seeks to avoid creating one for a questionable purchase.

- Reimbursements

- Budgeting

- Mileage points and other rewards

- Being able to dispute transactions

Overall though, few people explicitly want a digital record of all their payments. They are just willing to accept it because of the convenience that credit cards bring.

I think the point is that, in hotels, there are sometimes situations where they specifically want to got out of their way to avoid having records.

I don't know about hotel but the escort industry thrives on motels where I imagine all of them pay cash for their rooms.

I imagine even higher end escorts, that are far more exclusive (many of which have websites with paid photo shoot photos and online booking for known clients) and do incall in more upscale locations, use cash for rooms simply due to the amounts of cash they're seeing.

There's at least one subreddit for this industry, intended for owrkers only, and I'll peruse it occasionally, but I've never seen any of the higher end ones mention how they handle rooms. I suspect many have the client get the room, but i can also see the client paying cash for the room as well.

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Unrelated to escorts, the few times I've used motels/hotels I've paid cash simply because they haven't had a terminal on the desk and I'm not keen on handing my card over to someone behind a desk that you generally can't see over without leaning over it. My paranoia screams "great way for them to skim the card directly or take photo/video of it". Similarly the few times I've rented a car I've let them use my card for the hold but have paid cash.

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Unrelated to cash:

Hotels go to all sorts of means to build brands (like they are doing here with the 'clean coins'). Some chains will even go as far as making their locations all smell the same. I remember a podcast episode years ago that did a deep dive into hotel scent and appearance but for the life of me can't remember what podcast it was, perhaps Planet Money. Here's an article on scent branding though https://hbr.org/2018/04/inside-the-invisible-but-influential...

It wouldn't surprise me if a hotel even dealing with relatively small amounts of coinage in a given week would even go as far as hand-sorting rolls from a money service to select new coins as part of their brand. Chains do all sorts of psychological tricks to give you a familiar experience at their various locations in hopes of getting you to use their service over a competitor.

Even if you're paying cash for a room, how much of that are you paying in coins?

When I'm travelling overseas, I'll often use the hotel bill as a way to cash out my remaining local currency. I still get a receipt, just two lines under paid/reconciliation, one for cash and one for anything remaining on a card.

Your hotel bill is often the last large bill before you leave the country.

Same goes for splitting off the incidentals. It's not anything nefarious, I just would rather not have my food/drink on my corporate card. For one, it makes for cleaner accounting back at the office, which is always nice when doing lots of expense reports.

You've never taken a mistress?

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