I'm currently staying at a certain Hilton-affilated property and when I requested late checkout, the lounge attendant said it won't be a problem and sort of implied that having quite large F&B spend on my room account may have helped my case (it went along the lines of "we can normally only give 2 pm but I can see you're enjoying our restaurants a lot, so we'll make an exception for you"). It didn't sound very professional, but at least I found something interesting :D Interestingly, I never told the hotel but using one of the restaurants is indeed the main reason why I wanted the late checkout.

But it made me wonder how common is this? Are you looking at customer's incidental spending to determine their commercial value when deciding whether to bend normal policies? Would this also apply to a repeat guest (i.e. someone who previously spent a lot of money on extras gets a better upgrade)?

Just wondering how it works at other properties :)