No One is Losing Stars, InterContinental and Starwood Say

(MoneyWatch)  Starwood Hotels & Resorts backtracked from a Bloomberg article where one of its PR executives said the company would be dropping stars and amenities. Instead the comments made were about a "hypothetical" situation, not reality, Starwood said. It also reported no properties have lost stars.

Our expectation is that all Luxury Collection properties maintain a minimum 4-star rating and we are proud that the vast majority of our St. Regis properties operate at a 5-star level.

I also received an e-mail from Caroline Counihan, a spokeswoman for InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, who said the Bloomberg story "really misrepresented the InterContinental scenario."

"The majority of our hotels are still keeping their five-star (or equivalent ratings,)" she wrote.

I guess from that statement, some will not keep them, but I think her gist was that there was no broad star dropping by the company. (I guess Hilton Hotels Corp. hasn't reached me to complain about the story.) So what does this mean?

You can choose to believe that an overzealous Bloomberg reporter (Nadja Brandt) created a trend piece where there was none. Or, if you're a cynical type, you might think that PR and marketing executives spend their lives trying to minimize any hint of negative publicity -- usually done by way of apologies and requests for clarification.