The NY Times article states that hotel and food vouchers are a "thing of the past" when an airline screws up and they cancel a flight or you miss a connection.

However that wasn't my experience last Thursday with British Airways, when due to a "systems problem" with baggage on our connecting flight from Manchester, they failed to get myself, wife and two kids to our flight on time out of Heathrow to Newark, NJ with Virgin Atlantic. VA Flt was due to go out at 8:20pm and we missed the closeout time of 7:20 by 35 minutes.

BA put us up in the Hilton hotel at Terminal 4 in Heathrow, gave us the equvalent of $60 in food vouchers, and then flew us to Newark on their first flt the next morning at 9AM.

So the moral of the story might be, forget the mini motel and always fly British Airways.