End of an era: Even smokers have made their peace with "100% smoke free" hotels.

From USA Today

Read article

Should hotels be financially liable for damage caused by bed bugs?

Conceivably, they could be — if you can show that you didn’t bring them into the hotel yourself. And that's easier said than done.

Two misconceptions about bedbugs: people tend to associate them with nasty people with bad hygiene, and people tend to associate them with bad housekeeping. Both associations are fallacious. Bedbugs are no respector of hygiene. They feed on blood, not dirt.



Even the Beverly Hills Hilton or the Fontainebleu get bedbugs. Any hotel can, if a guest brings them in. There’s nothing you can do if you get an infestation in a room except close the room down and treat it. (Right away. Before they spread to any other rooms, or you rent that room to another guest.)

How do they come in? On your baggage. I’m not suggesting you’re a nasty person if I suggest you could have brought them in yourself — you or I could bring bedbugs into a hotel, if they come in on our bags, if you checked your bags at the wrong baggage area at the wrong airport.

How to Avoid Bedbugs on Vacation
Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Win
Bedbugs Discovered in Winston-Salem Bus Depot

Once you’ve been exposed, they’ll even get into your home.

As hotel housekeeping, what was the worst room you’ve had to clean?

I wasn't the housekeeper in either of these cases, but each is an example of why I'm grateful that those housekeepers are there, so I don't have to go in and clean up a mess like this.

An owner up in Connecticut took in a homeless guy and gave him a room and a hundred bucks or so a week in exchange for doing a lot of the maintenance around the place. About three months later when he began backsliding into his uncontrolled alcohol and substance abuse and it came time to vacate him out of there, the entire floor of the room in which he'd been living — with two cats, no less — was ankle-deep in garbage and cat poop. (The urine merely soaked into the carpet, which had to be replaced along with the mattresses and all soft goods.)

And then there were the two old guys who checked into a double room at a low end hotel here in Winston-Salem early on a Friday afternoon with several bottles of booze, paid in advance for three nights, and settled in on a hard, weekend-long drinking binge. Whenever either of them had too much and had to throw up, they just leaned over and puked right there on the floor between the two queen beds. Repeatedly. All through the weekend. After they left without checking out Monday morning, the housekeepers found a pile of accumulated vomit in that spot. The maintenance guys flipped for it to decide which one of them would be stuck with the job of heading down there with a flathead shovel to shovel it out. That room also got new carpet.

If you run a hotel, always treat your housekeepers with kindness and respect, and occasionally show a little gratitude and do a little extra for them. It's a dirty, nasty, not very well-compensated job, but they're what keeps you from having to put on an apron, roll out a cart, and go up there and do it.

Originally appeared on Quora

What do hotels do with the half-used soaps, shower gels and shampoos left behind in rooms after guests check out?

Toss them. It's wasteful and environmentally unsound, and we really do need to come up with a better solution than that; but without such a solution in place, that's about the limit of the options we have.
Originally appeared on Quora

Do hotels/maids prefer that I leave the room cleaned?

It's thoughtful -- and we really should be more grateful -- but believe it or not, it actually makes very little difference.

Of course, we'd rather have you as a guest than a rock band or someone throwing a wild party (or even just two or three nasty people, if they're really nasty people) that leaves the room completely trashed. But we allocate a half hour to clean a standard hotel room after a guest checks out, so we must figure the cost of that half hour into it; and that'll never change.

Part of it is that 99.9999% of people will just not tidy up behind themselves enough so that we can ever, ever count upon a reduction in that. But ultimately, it's because we still have to strip the sheets and change the beds, vacuum, and go over all the surfaces - especially in the bath - with disinfectant cleaner, and those three tasks alone take up most of the time involved, no matter how you tidy up behind yourself.

What happens to the half-used toilet paper roll left in a hotel room bathroom?

I've been the general manager of four different hotels of varying price and quality prior to forming my own company, and have never once had a housekeeper or room attendant come to me with an almost-used-up roll of toilet paper and a story that goes like, "this is all the toilet paper that was left on the roll in 207, it's not going to last the next guest even one trip to the toilet, much less an entire stay, so I put a new roll on: what do you want me to do with what's left of this one?"

Perhaps much of the reason why is . . . well, have you noticed the wall-mounted toilet paper dispenser in even the cheapest hotels?





Notice there's an unopened 'backup roll' in the recess behind the roll that's mounted on the roller. Guests in a room can use up the last of a roll, and there's another roll back there that they can move along to if they need more.

If I check into a hotel room, and something about the room is unacceptable, how do I proceed? (Say for example something about the cleanliness of the room: Dirty linens on the bed or dirty cups in the sink. Who do I contact? What is a polite way to let them know the room is not to standards and I need help getting it cleaned or changing rooms?)

Don't be shy about saying something. Housekeeping issues, dirty linens on the bed or dirty cups in the sink, are particularly unacceptable, and no decent hotel will expect you to endure that. If nothing else, they'll switch you to another room if you tell someone at the desk right away.

Old linens should be replaced as needed, and if an older, cheaper hotel tries to get too many more uses out of them, they're going to look dirty even if freshly washed.

One problem I've frequently encountered in such properties back in the day is that a guest will complain that the sheets on the bed are dirty. That's a no-win situation for both the guest and the clerk. Back in my day, I could get you new sheets - but they're going to come out of the same laundry room from which the housekeepers got the 'dirty' ones that are now on your bed . . .

So, if you suspect that's the case, I'd find another hotel the next time you're in that town.

Originally appeared on Quora

What do hotels do to keep their marble or any other stone floor spotless?

With stone? A strong soap and a weekly going over with a fiber scrub brush (in an area where food is not usually present, you might let it go a little longer, but don't abuse the privilege). At a Dairy Queen where I worked as a teenager, Wednesday night was 'scrub night' - we took about an hour and a half after closing and routine cleaning, and the entire terra cotta floor got done. Rinse well (you don't want to be leaving any soap residue in 'natural' cracks and crevices) and dry-mop as well as you can.



With polished marble? I'd go a little easier on the soap, maybe use something made to purpose (here's one commonly found brand: http://www.totalvac.com/WT760051...  ), and apply an extra layer of polish as necessary. 

Many polishes nowadays can take quite a beating and last quite a long time: it's shouldn't be like the old days where you should have to strip and re-wax three or four times a year. If you have the care instructions provided you by the supplier of the marble, you might want to take a look at those - I file away any paperwork I get on any furnishings and equipment I buy, but any commercial flooring or janitorial supply dealer should be able to hep you with what you need.

You can outsource it if you want, but remember . . . you pay your maintenance guy eight to fourteen bucks an hour and you can buy all the materials you need at Home Depot and even rent a floor buffer: contractors have a much higher per-hour rate for labor. Do the math . . .

Originally appeared on Quora

Why do hotel housekeepers put the tub stopper down after they clean?

This isn't something that we tell them to do, and doesn't seem like it would be a good idea. We'd have no good reason for wanting to tell them to do it.



My best guess  is, some of them clean the tub, rinse it out, then wipe over the water spots that occurred as part of the rinse, often hitting the lever for the drain as they do and leaving it down, not caring to see that it's put back in the 'up' position. 

(I might ask around and come back to this one, get an insight from some room attendants who'd have a little more up-close-and-personal experience with the phenomenon . . .)

Originally appeared on Quora

How do good hotels always feel so clean and fresh?

Housekeeping. You may think your own home is nice and clean, but even if you're an obsessive-compulsive neat freak, hotels play it at an entirely different level. We have to. 

For example, do you change and launder your sheets every day? No? But you put fresh sheets on the bed if you're expecting house guests for a few days, on any bed intended for their use, right?  And you supply them with fresh towels, not one you used yourself once already. And even then - well, when was the last time you steamed the carpet in your guestroom, or turned the mattress over?

All hotels deal with are house guests.

How do hotels dispose of 'slightly dirty' towels?

'Slightly dirty' towels go into the hotel laundry: we don't give up on them that easily. Towels are only retired if they show a stain that won't come out  or they start to get discolored or frayed. (If it's not too noticeable, we dye it blue and use it as a pool towel: otherwise, it gets dyed red and the housekeepers use it as a cleaning rag.)



Originally appeared on Quora

How many staff is needed for a 60 room hotel?

You need as many as you need. It's not a Navy ship: you don't have a "compliment" (I'm not a believer in organizational charts), but you've got a lot of work to do, and you need a number of people there who can get it all done.

Some people try to run a hotel without a 24-hour front desk, but with over 30 rooms (and anything smaller is a bed-and-breakfast, or a Mom and Pop), I wouldn't try anything like that. So the front desk has to be attended 24–7 -- 168 hours per week. Four full-time equivalent employees could get it done, with one odd shift left over for the general manager to take a turn at driving the desk each week (which is a practice I'd encourage anyway, especially in a property that small).

You're probably going to need more than four people. Between the inevitable scheduling issues, people calling off, occasional turnover, and some people who just don't want to work more than four days a week; if you try to get by with just four bodies, you're going to be vulnerable to incurring overtime pay. But on the front desk, you're still going to have the equivalent of four people working 40 hours a week, plus the extra eight hour shift.

If I check into a hotel room, and something about the room is unacceptable, how do I proceed?

Don't be shy about saying something. Housekeeping issues, dirty linens on the bed or dirty cups in the sink, are particularly unacceptable, and no decent hotel will expect you to endure that. If nothing else, they'll switch you to another room if you tell someone at the desk right away.




Old linens should be replaced as needed, and if an older, cheaper hotel tries to get too many more uses out of them, they're going to look dirty even if freshly washed. One problem I've frequently encountered in such properties back in the day is that a guest will complain that the sheets on the bed are dirty. That's a no-win situation for both the guest and the clerk. Back in my day, I could get you new sheets - but they're going to come out of the same laundry room from which the housekeepers got the 'dirty' ones that are now on your bed . . . 

So, if you suspect that's the case, I'd find another hotel the next time you're in that town.

Originally appeared on Quora

Why don't hotel rooms have liquid soap dispensers?

Like this?

It's too high-tech for a hotel. Seriously. 

And it's unsanitary. 

(Are you already starting to not believe a word of this one? . . .)

This past week I've been letting daylight in upon magic and holding us up for ridicule as an industry disinclined to have our technology keep up with the times and modern needs (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to Why does it take so long to check in at hotels? ), but oddly enough, this really is too high tech for a hotel. Before you start laughing . . . well, here's why: 

How bad are these hotel housekeeping lapses?

How bad, as in 'how dangerous', or 'how extremely gross'?  Not very. Usually, when they occur, they're pretty obvious, like the ones you mentioned. Usually, someone, often a guest, will spot something with the potential for extreme grossness before it gets too gross. Even the less obvious ones - dust across the top of a picture frames, film in the tub, grunge around the base of the toilet, something under a bed (beds should be on box bases, not angle-iron frames; but in some hotels, some still aren't) - are pretty obvious if someone just looks.



As far as dangerous or extremely gross goes, the worst I've seen - at separate incidents, in separate hotels of varying quality - were sharp objects left laying around: once the blade of a carpet knife left in the floor of a room where the carpetlayers weren't doing a very good job of picking up behind themselves (the hotel was being remodeled on the fly) resulting in injury to a guest; another time a hypodermic syringe left in the drawer of a nightstand (fortunately no injury beyond a disgusted guest who demanded a refund right away, although I'm aware of a situation that did occur at a Motel 6 in Virginia Beach where a small child had an unpleasant encounter with a previous guest's syringe while crawling around in the floor, and had to be hospitalized).

Why is it difficult to rid a room from the smell of cigarette smoke?

Any scent or odor is made up of microscopic particles of the substance that is the source of the scent or odor. Tobacco smoke floats in the air, and gets absorbed into everything it touches: your clothes (and even the clothing of people around you), the drapes, the bedding, the carpet, even the wallpaper. Once the smoke hits a wall, or a ceiling, or whatever and can no longer escape from the space it's in, it's got to settle somewhere.



Because it's mixed with moist, exhaled air, tobacco smoke tends to be kind of damp, to be absorbed into things, to stick like glue as it dries, and to accumulate with added exposure. In a hotel where housekeeping is slack enough to let it get to be a problem, I can stand out in the parking lot and point out the smoking rooms: they'll have that brown film on the glass that contrasts against the white backing of the drapes in the rooms - which itself will be coated with the same film - just like the inside of the car windshield in the vehicle of a driver who likes to smoke in the car . . .

How many room attendants needed to clean 150 guest rooms in a hotel?

In a 150-room hotel (which is larger than the 60 to 80 rooms we recommend building in most places, and the only reason we'd plan on that many is if there were going to be meeting and banquet facilities attached) that stays pretty full, I'd plan on eleven to maybe thirteen or fourteen housekeepers.

In hotel housekeeping, there's this weird thing about the number fourteen: that's how many rooms that most housekeepers like to make per day. I've seen some who'll do 20 or more rooms, and still do a good job. 



(Generally, it should take 30 minutes for a standard hotel room with the usual furnishings, if the guest checks out; and 15 minutes for a guest staying over. [Stephanie De La Rosa's answer to What is the average amount of time housekeeping spends per room to prepare a hotel room for a new guest? ] I allow 35 minutes for a checkout, 20 minutes for a stayover, and have the night auditor pull the housekeepers' time records and do the math on it every night. My housekeeping supervisor knows - and passes it along to all the girls - that if it takes more than that, I'm going to want to know why. I'm okay with it if they actually spent the time doing useful work that needed doing, or even if one or two of them had a bad day and things took longer than usual; but I, too, have to be able to justify my payroll costs.)

Why do most hotels use only white linen?

When you have to buy more, white is just about the easiest color to match. 



And you're always buying more. Why? Occasionally rips are a problem, but usually it's because of a stain that won't come out. Which is another reason: stains show up more readily on white linen. Sometimes, stains are a good thing -- they tell you that it's time to retire that sheet or pillowcase and replace it with a new one. A guest who finds a stain on a colored sheet won't spot it until he or she is looking at it much more up close and personal - and then he or she will be very unhappy about it.  (It's like a law: in the mind of most guests, any mystery stain on a sheet or other bedding will be blood, or something even more disgusting.) I want my housekeepers to spot any stains on my linens before they go on the bed, and then exchange it for one that isn't stained.

You can't always count on getting your replacement linens in the same shade of blue, green, peach or pastel yellow that you got last time if you go with colors.

Indeed, hotels that still use bedspreads at all are moving in a big way to white bedspreads - for all the same reasons.

Originally appeared on Quora

Why does the housekeeping staff never put away the in-room ironing board and iron in US hotels?

I've never noticed this to be a problem.



The key here would be communication. I have no doubt that the room attendant would put it away if she were clear that that's what the guest wants. If she doesn't, it's probably because she thinks that a guest staying over wants it left be.

Originally appeared on Quora.

If I purchase packaged food during a trip, never open it, and leave it in my hotel room when checking out, will the staff be permitted to eat it?

I'd rather they didn't, but I can't stop them, and they do it at their own risk. (I have no control over what they eat or how they procure their food outside the hotel, or during their off-duty time, either.) Perishable items are never left behind, and the best thing to do with them in a lot of cases is to throw them out, but that's going to be a little counterintuitive to a low-paid employee who sees an unopened food item that would otherwise go to waste.

We have policies that require high-value items to be turned in to lost and found, and that forbid taking any item from the hotel that you did not bring with you without permission; but if I were staying in a hotel and left behind an unopened bag of cookies or chips, or a couple of unopened beers in a six-pack, I wouldn't count on ever seeing them again.

Originally appeared on Quora