Don’t pack the Yoga mat: Hotels and Travel services are picking up the slack in travel

It’s no secret that the experience of flying is, with the exception of the ultra-luxurious, getting more and more frustrating. But when travelers have a bad trip, it’s not just the airlines that suffer.

Many Hotels and travel services like Travelocity are starting to pick up the slack in the travel experience by offering additional services or trying to provide information where the airlines have dropped the ball:

Affinia Hotels, with properties in New York, Chicago and Washington, recently began maintaining guest profiles so that its hotels can have things like yoga mats, laptop chargers and other items guests may want in their room but don’t want to lug on a plane. In response to American Airlines’ plans to charge $15 each way for the first checked bag, Loews Hotels is reimbursing guests this summer with bag fee receipts up to $30.

Or check out what Travelocity is doing to make sure you have a place to sleep:

After discovering a pattern of dropped reservations at certain hotels, Travelocity hired a company in India to call the hotels ahead of customer stays to make sure they were prepared for the guests. The company says this has reduced the incidence of dropped reservations in two years to less than 1 percent from as high as 20 percent.

The lesson here seems to be: If you can spare the change to do your booking through a service instead of just grabbing a credit card and heading to yourfavoriteariline.com, you’ll end up with a little extra padding for the bumps and hassles that almost inevitably go with air travel.