Check in or out at any time? Sure, if you have clout or cash

IN a perfect world, you could check in and out of your hotel room at any hour, without penalty. Pay for 24 hours, get 24 hours, right?

That may work for celebrities and other special people. But most of us mortals pay for 24 hours and actually get 20 or fewer. We check in no earlier than 3 or even 4 p.m., and check out no later than 11 a.m. or noon.

Hoteliers say they will bend their posted policies for big spenders, frequent guests and, if they have an available room, just about anyone else. But you have to ask in advance and be smart about when to push the envelope.

A few plush places will even let you stay a full 24 hours or beyond for one night’s payment.

Why are check-in and checkout times so standardized? Industry experts say the staff needs time to clean rooms. Because housekeeping employees typically work 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., hotels may need to pay overtime or add shifts to process early check-ins and late checkouts. That’s costly.

Hotels also risk losing revenue if you check out at, say, 8 p.m. -- far past the time most guests are willing to check in.

Stay late at many hotels, and you may be charged extra -- or not. Hotel practices vary. Hotels may charge a fixed fee or half the daily room rate to guests who overstay their welcome.

At certain hotels it may be getting harder to find flexibility.

Many casino resorts have pushed the check-in time ahead to 4 p.m. and checkouts back to 11 a.m., said Thomas Mueller, director of hotel operations for the Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa in Cabazon, Calif.

Such hotels face unique challenges, he said. Occupancies are high, and stays are short. Get behind on room cleaning, and problems snowball.

Although declining to give a figure, Mueller said a “large percentage” of Morongo’s guests lingered beyond checkout time, “especially if they’re having a good run of luck” at gambling.

That puts pressure on housekeeping. It takes 25 to 90 minutes, depending on the size of the space, to clean each Morongo room or suite, said Rick Baker, executive housekeeper.

Throughout the hotel industry, the trend toward luxury design is also making more work for room cleaners, Mueller and others said. Elaborate bedding and bigger rooms add precious minutes to cleaning chores.

“The trend is more spacious rooms, especially the bathrooms,” said Sean O’Flaherty, Chicago-based vice president of quality assurance for hotels, restaurants and spas for the Mobil Travel Guide, which inspects and rates lodging.

Many of these bathrooms are lined with hard-to-clean marble and loaded with amenities that need to be restocked.

Then there’s the bed.

Westin’s plush Heavenly Bed a few years back set off “an arms race in bedding,” said Lars Negstad, a Chicago-based coordinator in the strategic affairs department of Unite Here, a union representing hotel workers.

High-end hoteliers, he said, try to see “who can throw the most pillows, high-thread-count sheets and duvets at the customer.”

But what’s heavenly for guests can bedevil housekeeping. “All that adds up to more time, more weight, more motion for the staff,” Negstad said.

Despite the pressures, many hotels will accommodate early-arriving and late-departing guests under certain circumstances.

Morongo extends such privileges to customers who “spend an exorbitant amount of money on the gaming floor or in restaurants,” Mueller said.

The Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills will sometimes tweak its “3 p.m. check-in, noon checkout” rule if it has a room available, said spokeswoman Sarah Cairns. But when I spoke with her recently, she said the hotel, where published rates start at $375 per night, had been sold out the six previous nights.

Four Points by Sheraton LAX allows guests who pay a $95 nightly room rate (or more) to occupy rooms for 24 hours, said Marykay Tsuji, guest loyalty coordinator. (Rooms sometimes go for $89 per night, she said.) The hotel caters to business travelers, and its policy helps accommodate their schedules, she said.

At many hotels, you may enjoy leeway if you belong to a frequent-guest program or travel on a corporate account.

At Ritz-Carltons, “it’s all about how frequently you are a customer,” said Ritz spokeswoman Vivian Deuschl.

A common rule for Ritz hotels is to check in at 3 p.m. and check out by noon. But unless the hotel is fully booked, guests should be able to get another hour or so without being charged extra, she said.

So how does a handful of hotels offer so-called 24-hour or flexible checkouts? The answer is usually money -- lots of it.

Raffles L’Ermitage Beverly Hills, where published rates start at $468 per night, hasn’t had preset checkout times since it opened in 1998, said Lara Weiss, director of sales and marketing. If you check in at 8 p.m., you can stay until 8 the next night and even beyond, if needed, she said.

If you want early check-in -- especially popular with Australians arriving at LAX soon after dawn -- “we will always have a room,” she said. If the hotel is nearly full, it may not be the room you prefer. There are limits to what money can buy.

To make longer stays possible, Raffles has at least one room attendant on duty around the clock. “We can clean rooms at 2 a.m. if necessary,” Weiss said.

And no matter how heavily booked it is, she added, the hotel keeps a few of its 119 rooms vacant “to protect ourselves from the average person who checks out late and to accommodate the walk-in who is the regular, important guest.”

Two years ago, the Raffles chain extended flexible check-in policies to other hotels.

The 196-room Peninsula Beverly Hills, where published rates begin at $425 per night, has a similar policy, said Managing Director Ali Kasikci. Housekeeping staff members have staggered start times between about 5:30 and 8 a.m., he said, based on historic patterns of guests’ comings and goings.

Kasikci said flexibility was an investment in his well-heeled customers.

“You leave a little bit of money on the table,” he said. “But the goodwill you create for your clients brings them back again and again.”

Industrywide, there hasn’t been a rush to 24-hour check-in. In fact, Ritz-Carlton, which once offered this program in Asia, no longer does so, said the Ritz’s Deuschl.

Mobil’s O’Flaherty said he knew of only a handful of hotels, mostly in New York or Beverly Hills, that offered rolling check-in and checkout as a general policy.

The perk is usually confined to “super-luxury players” in the lodging world, said Cathy A. Enz, a professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y. “In a highly competitive environment, it may give you an advantage.”

At almost any hotel, though, you can increase your chances of getting an early check-in or a late checkout, the experts said. Here’s how:

* Join the hotel’s frequent-guest program. At casinos, sign up for gaming cards that earn points good toward food and beverage purchases and resort stays. These steps help identify you as a loyal customer.

* Ask for early check-in or late checkout on days when there are fewer guests. In resort areas, these are often weekdays; in business-oriented hotels, these may be weekends.

* Give advance notice. If you hope to check in early, let the hotel know that when you book the room. If you figure you’ll need to check out late, tell the front desk when you arrive. There’s no guarantee you’ll get what you want, but at least you’re giving the staff time to accommodate you.

If you’re denied special access to your room, ask the hotel if it will store your luggage for a period before check-in or after checkout. Many will do so, freeing you up for extra hours to tour the city or conduct business unencumbered.

You may also be able to use other facilities while waiting for your room. At Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, for instance, where check-in is at 4 p.m., guests can use the spa and fitness center and pool, plus the lobby and restaurants, until their room is ready, said Armella Stepan, vice president of strategic development for the hotel’s management company.

Hear more tips from Jane Engle on Travel Insider topics at latimes.com/engle. She welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.