It doesn’t imply that. I’m pretty sure it is all false positives, but that number does not imply that. It could simply be that only ~1 in 84 smokers was being fined before
A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.
No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”
Because when your revenue goes from $10 million to half a billion, you just say that. Percentages are papering over bad initial or final conditions.
Drug companies do it all the time. They market something as providing a "50% reduction" in some metric and in the fine print you find it's a change from 0.5% to 0.25% in occurrence.
> No, this is a statistics trope. “Our revenue has grown 50x this year” always means “our revenue was <something laughable like $100> and now it’s <something still laughable like $5000>”
Orthogonal. I said it doesn’t imply it, and it doesn’t. It may suggest it’s likely - and it does - but it does not imply it.
No... it could be false positives, it could also be that almost no one (~1%) of smokers were caught before and this is actually a miracle technology that detects smoking.
Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
> Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
How? How does this track?
Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide!
If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke. Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it.
If someone smokes in a room and you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low!
The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
They might be trying to indirectly generate revenue from legal marijuana.
Places like Vegas have a huge amount of recreational sales to tourists. They're clearly smoking the product somewhere, and it's not on the casino floor. One might bet they are engaging in some amount of activity with the potential to generate revenue for the hotel.
This. I've noticed a lot more smoke smell in hotel rooms in the last five years but it's always cannabis -- not tobacco -- in states that have legalized it for purchase but still disallow its use in public spaces.
Eh, just because most people don't report most rule violations... And on the flip side most organizations don't really encourage their employees to report rule violations.
Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.
The hotels don't ever catch people in the act, they just let housekeeping report that the room smells like smoke and they take the fine out of your deposit.
That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
Why wouldn’t they report you? It isn’t like you know who your housekeeper is or that they have any reason to believe you’ll be a repeat guest that will continue to tip them.
