Is it ever OK to lie to get an upgrade in a hotel or on a flight?

“Just go nuts.” That is veteran hotelier Anne Golden’s advice to guests wondering whether it’s acceptable to say they’re on their honeymoon in the hope of a better room. “We know guests lie,” she says, cheerfully, from her office at Pan Pacific London. “And honestly, it doesn’t really bother us.”

Golden, a hotelier with decades of experience on the operational side of hospitality, is unusually frank about a truth most travellers assume: that front desks are asked for free upgrades constantly, and special occasions are one of the most common excuses guests pull, whether it's birthdays, anniversaries or honeymoons — and whether it's genuine or fake.

“If you’re going to the trouble of saying you’re honeymooners,” she says, “just make sure you look incredibly in love in the public areas, and we’ll go along with your little charade. We love it.”

Golden says staff can usually tell when a celebration is genuine. Parents or friends, for example, will have contacted the hotel ahead of time to arrange champagne, gifts or flowers — and that's all noted in the hotel's central system. But when those signals aren’t there, no one is pulling guests aside for questioning. “We would never be so rude as to say, ‘you know what, we don’t believe you,’” she says. “We’re in the business of making people happy. We're not going to call the police."

That indulgence, however, sits alongside systems that remember everything. Customer relationship management software logs birthdays, honeymoons and anniversaries across entire hotel groups. “Try not to scam the same hotel with the same scam twice,” Golden advises. “A good CRM system will show it.”

Ironically, that memory can work in a guest’s favour. Mention a birthday once and it may follow you for years, triggering small gestures long after the candles have been blown out. “As soon as you tell us your birthday, we’ll do something really fun for you,” Golden says. “But it will go in the system.”

That worldview still exists in much of hospitality, but travel advisors say it’s increasingly colliding with harder commercial realities, particularly in destinations built around once-in-a-lifetime trips. “All of my clients are celebrating something,” says Allison Collier, a luxury travel advisor whose work revolves around honeymoons, anniversaries and milestone journeys. “That’s usually the motivation for travelling in the first place.”

Collier’s business skews heavily toward couples and families. Younger clients book honeymoons, then reappear years later for anniversaries. Older couples travel with children to mark graduations or birthdays. When she communicates with hotels, she’ll always flag a genuine celebration, but she’s careful about what that implies.

“If they’re celebrating something, I’ll say so,” she explains. “If they’re not, I don’t mention it at all.” What she doesn’t do is invent milestones, and she’s increasingly cautious about how the word “honeymoon” is deployed, especially as some hotels – particularly in the Maldives – now require proof of marriage to access honeymoon packages or perks.

Traditionally, she explains, honeymoon recognition followed a loose, informal ladder. At the bottom rung: acknowledgement at check-in, then perhaps a bottle of champagne or prosecco in the room, arranged via the advisor. Next might come rose petals during turndown. Anything more elaborate – be it a private beach dinner, bespoke desserts or floral installations – was almost always paid for by the couple.

“A hotel will do anything for you if you foot the bill,” Collier says. “But people increasingly measure hospitality by what they get for free.” That expectation, she believes, has been fuelled by social media. TikTok is awash with scripts, hacks and viral videos promising upgrades through charm alone. The problem isn’t one guest trying their luck — it’s if everyone does, and there's not enough to go around. “That’s when the system breaks,” she says.

From the airline side, that breaking point arrived years ago. David Cochrane, Head of Air Travel at Brightsun Travel and a former airline operations executive with decades of experience, says the idea of getting an upgrade by claiming a honeymoon is now largely a fantasy — at least in the air. “No airline really does that anymore,” he says. “And they definitely don’t upgrade you because you say it’s your honeymoon.”

Where airlines once acknowledged special occasions with small gestures, upgrades today involve layers of approval and paperwork. “At one airline I worked for, any upgrade had to be signed off by a vice president,” Cochrane says. “It just wasn’t worth it.” He’s also blunt about the ethics. “Don’t lie about it,” he says. “They can check. And honestly, if you want a specific seat, just pay for it.”

Hotels, though, still operate in a greyer space — and many hoteliers admit they knowingly tolerate a degree of exaggeration. At Linthwaite House in England’s Lake District, general manager Karen Irving says celebrations are so common they barely register as exceptional. “On a weekend, probably 60 per cent of our guests say they’re celebrating something,” she says, insisting that those declarations don’t automatically trigger upgrades.

At Burgh Island Hotel in Devon, general manager Sally Russell takes an even more relaxed view. Guests frequently cite anniversaries or birthdays that turn out to be somewhat flexible. “You find out the birthday was three months ago, or the anniversary is in six months’ time,” she says, amused. “There’s often a bit of date-stretching.” Russell doesn’t see this as malicious. “I think it’s natural,” she says. “Our instinct is always to look after the guest. If we can do something nice, why not?”

That generosity, however, relies on discretion, and discretion doesn’t scale forever. Even Anne Golden, the champion of indulgence, acknowledges the change — not about catching people out, she says, but managing expectations in an era where everyone knows the tricks.

And that may be the uncomfortable answer to the question. Lying for an upgrade isn’t a great moral failing – many hoteliers expect it, tolerate it, and sometimes even enjoy it – but once those small lies scale into a system-wide behaviour, the consequences land not on the fibbers, but on everyone else.

By Scott Campbell