Plans May Vary
When the plan breaks.
Something will go sideways. This is the part where you decide, in advance and in daylight, which hotel you call and what it costs. Name it, put a number on it, and it lands in your trip's costs. 65 corridors covered.
Enter by the decision
Trip type, then corridor
A plain city trip still needs hotel tax, meals, and a named fallback night — otherwise the mark-up you are measuring against a park or resort is not honest.
Same disruption pattern: · · ·
Access locked before deposits stick
Pattern
Chicago / The Loop
Air / road · ORD, MDW · The Loop · River North / Streeterville · West Loop / Fulton Market · Rosemont / ORD corridor
A Loop weekend on a tax stack most of the country does not have, into the two airports that got measurably worse this year. The room headline is roughly four-fifths of what the folio says, and winter decides whether you sleep here an extra night.
River North, Streeterville or the West Loop first; the Rosemont airport corridor when the core is genuinely gone — it sits on the Blue Line, so an airport room is not a stranded room.
Season window
December – March · Weather / fare. O'Hare normals run 36.7" of snow a year, most of it Dec–Feb. The failure is the ground stop, not the total — and lake-effect events are the ones that arrive badly forecast.
Recommended friction for this window $160 (default $160).
Household sample
Chicago / Loop baseline
Couple · Midwest baseline · 2 nights
Midwest baseline city. Hotel tax stack and ORD weather delay are the trip — useful compare against NYC, Denver, and SF as baselines.
- Hotel tax & occupancy assessments modeled as mandatory
- Named city or ORD-corridor recovery
- Origin airport line when flying in
Recovery lodging
Name a town, not a hope
The Loop
Primary base
Walkable to everything; carries the full tax stack including the new tourism assessment.
River North / Streeterville
First overflow
Still walkable to the Loop when the core prices out.
West Loop / Fulton Market
Second overflow
Residual rooms on convention weeks.
Rosemont / ORD corridor
Airport recovery
Outside city limits, so outside the city hotel taxes — and on the Blue Line, which is why it works when a downtown recovery does not.
Rosemont levies its own municipal hotel tax; that rate was not verified.
Checklist
Critical before deposits stick
0% of corridor checks · 7 critical still open
Close first: Full tax stack modeled as mandatory — about 19% at a 100+ room central hotel
Reservations and access
Timing and buffers
Recovery posture
Party and care