A Few Votes We Didn’t Count

As Mom used to say, cheaters never prosper. That’s why, though they got a fair share of votes, the following lodgings aren’t listed among the Favorite Hotel winners.

Although our rules didn’t specify that hotels, motels and inns couldn’t vote for themselves--or wage a get-out-the-vote campaign--in the Travel section’s informal readers’ poll, we assumed they’d play fair.

Silly us.

Silly them. We called the phone numbers on the ballots and discovered . . . foul play!

One lodging, we discovered, gave photocopied ballots to its guests as they checked out. Another sent e-mails to its clients urging them to vote. And in what might be the most blatant case of self-promotion, one well-known hotel chain snagged votes from people who work in its own marketing department. (The name of the chain appeared on the top of a ballot faxed to The Times. Duh!)

The obvious hypesters aside, should we have disqualified the others that goosed the vote?

Maybe not. In fairness, the people who voted for these lodgings not only had stayed at them, but genuinely seemed to like them.

Take, for instance, the Knickerbocker Mansion at Big Bear Lake. It got several votes in the mid-range category. People who responded to the poll raved about it in subsequent interviews.

“I’ve stayed at many different places, but the Knickerbocker is my favorite,” said Ellen Collins, who lives near Detroit and has visited four times. “I absolutely love it.” Still, Collins said she wouldn’t have known about the ballot if she hadn’t received an e-mail from the inn.

Stanley Miller, one of the Knickerbocker’s innkeepers, acknowledged that he e-mailed Collins and contacted other (presumably satisfied) customers to spur them on. “To be a success,” Miller said, “you have to hustle.”

Sheila Hirsch of Santa Rosa had good things to say about the Laguna Hills Lodge in Orange County, which got several votes for best budget hotel. It’s convenient when she visits family in Laguna Woods and Seal Beach, as she did in mid-July. That’s when Hirsch received a photocopied Travel section ballot.

Jean Brucato, Laguna Hills Lodge’s office manager, said she wanted her boss’ hard work to be recognized, so she asked guests for comments. “We didn’t force anyone,” she said.

A dozen ballots for the Northwoods Resort, also at Big Bear Lake, as the best mid-range hotel, arrived between 4:30 and 11:30 p.m. on one day, well into the three-week voting period, which suggested a wee bit of orchestration. (Sherri DuChateau, director of sales and marketing at Northwoods, said she knew customers had been contacted but did not know how, when or by whom.)

In San Diego, the Dana Inn’s sales manager, Heidi Park, did a little orchestrating herself, she conceded. She asked about 10 family members and friends to vote for the lodging. But some people, like Anita Speer of Huntington Beach, said she marked the inn without prompting.

“The location was just very, very nice,” Speer said of the inn, which is on Mission Bay and near Sea World. She and her husband, William, in San Diego for a sporting event, got a bonus: They could see the Sea World fireworks from the inn.