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 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

On the day you check into your hotel the hot water fails. You have no choice but to stay at the hotel. What compensation would you expect?

It would depend entirely on the hotel.

A Hampton Inn would probably comp the room, but Hampton Inn's “100% satisfaction guarantee” policy is their choice, and it's not binding on other hotels. Every hotel has its own policies on the matter.

Absent some state or local law on the matter, requiring compensation in a situation like that (and stipulating precisely how much would have to be done to put things right with the guests), it would have to be negotiated with the hotel's management.

Because in a situation like that, each guest would be affected differently, we would plan on negotiating it individually guest by guest. On the one hand we can't be responsible for consequential damages, because we never can never foresee or control what those might be for any one person. On the other hand, while we may have to plan on making a few adjustments and even comping some rooms, and we'll want to do the right thing as much as possible, by as many people as we can; some guests might not have even noticed it was a problem, and not look into making any claim at all.

Doing it that way involves applying a little more triage than it's polite to notice, or than we would like to admit that we apply; but that's about the size of it.

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.

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 . . .

What does it take to run a successful hotel?

I could ask, 'define success'. Are you running a Motel 6 on an I-80 offramp in Podunk, Kansas; or are you going to go all out with mega-luxury, rooms you can rent for $800 to $3000 per night, lots of meeting and banquet space, and a restaurant that people will fly in for; and give the St. Regis [http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel...] a run for it? It makes a difference. Usually. For this answer, I'll try to not let it.

Like my answer to What does it take to start a hotel?, this is one of those open-ended questions that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but for the fact that someone of the caliber of David S. Rose was doing the asking (which could work into a great leap forward for my company if he should ever decide to stray outside tech ventures and into more real estate, "Main Street" businesses, and bricks and mortar-related stuff, and he likes my answers on the subject); because no answer anyone could give would come close to adequate.