By Shane Rodgers
For me, like many people, the COVID pandemic disrupted many years of potential travel.
In some respects, it nudged time forward and sent us through a worm hole to a world where everything had changed. Not a lot. But enough to notice.
And so it is with hotels, of all things.
Earlier this year my wife and I spent about six weeks travelling overseas for the first time in quite a while.
We stayed at eight different hotels across six countries, all of them decent mid-range places with 24-hour reception inhabited by pleasant people with uniforms that matched the building.
Just like we remember them. Until you look closely. Quite a bit had changed, much of it quite oddly.
Bedding
For a start there is bedding. Not long ago a hotel bed had a bottom fitted sheet, a top sheet, a blanket and a quilt. Rooms were air conditioned and often had a fan. You had options.
Over recent years, something weird has happened to the bedding. In all of the hotels we stayed, there was no top sheet, just a fitted sheet and a quilt.
They had a blanket in the room but hotel blankets always look like a throw rug from my grandma’s 1970s loungeroom, and like that was the last time they were washed.
You certainly couldn’t put them over your body without a top sheet for fear of having nightmares about being eaten alive by bed bugs in your sleep.
The bedding options seem to suggest that you are expected to sleep just on the fitted sheet with no covers or crank up the air-conditioning to Super Butcher levels and sleep under the quilt.
For me, the options mean always getting a terrible hotel sleep. I can never sleep under a quilt. I overheat. I also hate having air conditioning running cold unnecessarily. It is such a waste of power, and you breathe cold air all night.
In a bid to get better sleep, at each hotel I asked for a top sheet. They gave me one, but it was nearly always another fitted sheet. So I would sleep at a $500 a night hotel wrestling a fitted sheet to try to make it work as a real sheet and wondering: “Who has taken all of the world’s top sheets!?”.
Fridges
The oddities did not end there. At least one of the hotels did not have a fridge, so you couldn’t keep anything that needed refrigerating in the room. Only one of the hotels with a fridge still had a minibar and only half had the tiny milk container we used to expect (which is not much use anyway for the lactose-intolerant among us).
Not that you needed the milk. One of the better hotels did not have a jug. A few hotels had real coffee machines with an allocation of four precious pods. But mostly they had satchels of swept-off-the-floor 1950s-style coffee dust that would make George Clooney grimace.
Phones
At one hotel I needed to phone reception to ask a question. Then I looked around. No phone. Huh? Doesn’t every hotel room have a phone. Apparently not.
That’s okay, I have a mobile phone. What’s the number again? I look it up. I phone. The hotel is part of a chain. I need to go via another country to talk to reception downstairs. Makes perfect sense.
Streaming services
To take your mind off this, you can always go to your television and log onto your streaming service. Maybe.
While most of us don’t watch a lot of TV while travelling, it is good to have the option at night if you can’t sleep because of the bedding situation.
Only one of our eight hotels had a simple interface to log in. The rest had varying versions of possibly using your phone app to link to the TV, once you have completed your software engineering degree.
This was never easy. Only one hotel had instructions. These of course didn’t work, even though I was sure I did it right. I rang reception (Yippee there was a phone in the room and I could just dial 9!).
“Sorry sir, it sometimes takes about 10 minutes to load. Please just be patient.” Ten minutes! Okay. I must have woken up in 1998 by mistake. My bad.
Same issue at the next hotel. “Yes, we don’t have streaming at the moment, but we are looking at getting it. Can you just watch on your phone?” Of course, my phone. We could watch on a screen the size of a matchbox. Perfect.
Simple improvements
Believe it or not, I’m not a fussy traveller and my needs are few. And, outside of being told off by a Norwegian hotel worker for turning up at breakfast four minutes before the official start time, the staff were all wonderful and helpful.
But it struck me that hotels have one job. And when you are travelling, they are your sanctuary away from whatever craziness you inflict on yourself during the day.
A few simple things would make a big difference:
- A top sheet if you want it.
- Somewhere simple and clever to dry clothes (like a drying closet I once saw at a place in Paris) – You don’t always have time when you are travelling to use a laundry service.
- Simple, easy and consistent access to online streaming services.
- Either a room phone or a hotline phone number that links you straight to reception.
- A small fridge so you keep drinks cold if you like such luxuries.
- A real coffee machine. You can buy a pretty good one at Aldi for $78.99!
- If you are providing a tiny milk container, ask when you book if you have a preference or you are lactose intolerant.
- A few simple, healthy snacks that are free because they are built into the room price (to avoid the conversation that starts with a ‘did you take anything from the mini-bar last night?’, which always sounds judgemental). That way if you get in late and famished you don’t feel tempted to gnaw on the pillows. You could order these options in advance using the sophisticated system perfected by 1980s school tuckshops.
- Put more clothing and wash cloth hooks in the bathroom. My wife judges all hotels by the number of hooks.
- If you have irons and ironing boards in the room, get good ones. Most hotel irons leave you looking like a homeless person and the boards are like rickety, semi-failed Ikea projects with mysterious left-over pieces.
It seems that hotels somehow have become lost in the past and even some of the simple things we came to expect are disappearing. I can’t think of anything really innovative I have seen in any hotel in the past 20 years.
Surely this is an opportunity.
Shane Rodgers is a writer and business leader. He is the author of Tall People Don’t Jump – The Curious Behaviour of Human Beings and Worknado – Reimagining the way you work to lives.
