As a motoring journalist I’ve spent a significant portion of the ten past years of my life searching for light switches and fiddling with incomprehensible air-conditioning systems in hotel rooms all over the world. It comes with the territory. And while I’ll admit that the hotels we’ve been booked-in at have generally been of a pretty high standard, it hasn’t always been the case. I’ve stayed in anything from a hotel where the carpet was a few shades lighter under the bed than around it, to one where pubes were dangling off the bottom of shower curtains, to near palace-like hotels where I even had my own butler. And you know what, there are about ten things all of them consistently get wrong.
1. “Open-plan” showers
These may look very smart (and it avoids the aforementioned pubes on the shower curtain issue), but I’m afraid it only works if the bathroom is very, very large. From personal experience I can vouch for the fact that everything within close proximity will be wet. These include the toilet, the toilet paper and, obviously, the floor. Because you’ll most likely be unable to turn up the temperature of the air-conditioning (see point 4), the floor and the toilet will remain wet for the night. This will most certainly lead to the following scenario. Firstly, you may have forgotten about the wet toilet when visiting the bathroom in the middle of the night. There’s nothing quite as annoying as slipping out of a warm bed and then sitting down on a wet, cold toilet bowl. Of course, seeing as you could also not locate a light switch when getting out of bed (see point 7), you most probably could also not find your slippers, so you’ve walked barefoot onto a cold, wet bathroom floor. That means you are now wide-awake. But because you still can’t find a light switch, you also can’t find the TV remote, and therefore spend the rest of the night quite frustrated and bored, eating ridiculously expensive peanuts.
2. No kettle – no coffee
Is kettle-theft really such a big problem in upmarket hotels that I can’t be trusted to make my own cup of coffee? Or perhaps having a kettle on the bar fridge spoils the minimalist design of the hotel room? I don’t care to be honest”¦ after experiencing a night as described in point 1, I just want to make myself a cup of coffee. It really is a hotel room necessity, not a nice-to-have.
3. Power outlets
If a guest is visiting your hotel from another city or country, which is mostly the case, then it is very likely that he or she’ll be bringing a suitcase full of electrically-powered items (next time I shall be bringing a kettle, by the way). I’ve spent many hours in hotel rooms trying to locate suitable power outlets, but quite often they are hidden behind the bed’s unmovable headboard or behind cupboards. Power outlets (a few of them), should be conveniently positioned near the desk and the bed.
4. Air-conditioning
I’m quite sure there exists a code between hotel staff members that forces them to select either a room temperature that could cryogenically preserve ailing life forms, or one that have you heading straight for the bar fridge and a cold beer. In both cases you’ll attempt to remedy the situation by reaching for the air-con’s remote control. Good luck to you if you are not Bill Gates or a rocket scientist. You are only likely to make the fan blow really hard, or switch it off altogether.
5. Pillow overload
“Designer” hotels are especially guilty of this, but I see even some mainstream hotels are catching the pillow bug. Firstly, it is very, very easy just to throw all the pillows on the floor. The problem is that, seeing as you’ll be fumbling about at night, you’ll trip over them. Obviously, the landing, at least, will be soft. The bigger problem presents itself in the morning. I like to leave a reasonably organised hotel room behind. I simply don’t have the time to reorganise 32 pillows. Here’s a tip – if you can’t find your shoes in the morning, look under the mountain of pillows.
6. No ironing facilities
When I arrive at a hotel, it is usually after at least 15 hours of non-stop travelling. This means that my clothes have either been rearranged by an overly zealous customs official, or simply that they are very creased. I am here on business and need to look smart. I’m sorry, I don’t know how a trouser press works. Just leave me a steam iron and an ironing board so that I can stand in front of the television and watch dodgy German reality shows while doing the ironing myself. Yes, I’ve tried using your laundry service lady to do it for me, but she always shows right at the very last possible second, and the waiting causes great stress.
7. Light switches
This should be really simple, and yet, it’s not. In one English bathroom I had to shower in darkness after a fruitless search for a light switch. Here’s some advice. Three switches next to the bed please – one for the lamp next to the bed, one for the main bedroom light, and the other for the bathroom.
8. Confusing doors
Perhaps its another “designer” thing, but having bathroom, closet and exit doors all look exactly the same, complete with the same door handles and mirrors, is a very confusing thing for a man who’s only been in the room for five minutes and who is walking out of a shower with burning eyes (see point 9). This is how I once, in Norway, ended up starkers in the corridor, giving the vacuum lady a surprise “exotic dance”.
9. User-unfriendly showers
The first issue with hotel showers is that it is nearly always unclear how the tap works! Should you twist/pull/push? And in which direction is hot/cold? As a result you’ll almost always end up getting an ice-cold jet of water on the back (in the case of the shower), or if the handshower has been “activated” some other sensitive area of the body.
The second major issue is the current trend to not have a little shelf for soaps and shampoos. Putting soap down on the shower floor isn’t something I like doing terribly much, so I tend to end up juggling a bar of soap and a shampoo bottle while showering. This leads to burning eyes and plenty swearing (and surprise strip shows, eventually – see point 8).
10. Electric toilets
This point mostly applies when visiting the East, and particularly Japan (one of my favourite countries). However, you’d expect hotels frequented mostly by foreign guests to understand that the electric toilets, with their Japanese instructions, may be a little tricky to operate. If you want to avoid flooded floors and grown-men screaming like little girls when inadvertently activating the bidet function, please include English translations. And why, oh why, would you put the toilet handle on the side of the basin?
Photo by pietroizzo
