FIVE Items Everyone Should Avoid at Hotels

Many of you have teased me over my germaphobe hotel habits for years. As soon as I step into a hotel room, you can count on me whipping out disinfectant wipes and cleaning each surface. While my obsession over killing germs has been fodder during reception cocktails over the years, I still believe I’m onto something.

The typical housekeeper is expected to clean 15 to 20 rooms daily, depending on the hotel or resort. So, do the math. In the best-case scenario, that only gives each housekeeper roughly twenty to thirty minutes to spend on each room.

During this window, they strip and make the beds, swap out towels, restock amenities, remove the garbage, replace furniture, and more. With so many tasks and little time, many sections of the room can go uncleaned and certainly not disinfected.

Below are five items in a standard hotel room that will not likely get cleaned during a routine switchover. If you use these items, consider developing methods to disinfect them during your next stay.

The ice bucket should be fine, considering most hotels also provide plastic liners. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind next time you consider going liner-free. Especially in hotels that allow pets, ice buckets are used as dog bowls, buckets to throw up in, and they are not normally cleaned after every guest leaves. Water or even ice is dumped in the bathroom sink. Then the bucket is given a quick wipe with a dust rag and perhaps sprayed with whatever cleaning solution the hotel provides housekeeping staff.

Largely, coffee makers are only hastily cleaned, as many hotels are more interested in spotlessness and pace than sanitation. Therefore, they are seldomly deep cleaned and may have bacteria, possibly mold growing internally, due to stagnant water and lack of cleaning.

Drinking glasses are not gathered and delivered to be correctly washed and sanitized in a dishwasher. When asked, housekeepers will tell you that drinking glasses and coffee mugs are rinsed and dried in the bathroom sink. Most hotels do not provide Housekeepers with dish soap. Pack several travel-size cleaning products, such as disinfectant wipes, and give anything you’ll use in the hotel room a quick wipe. This too includes TV remote controls, telephones, doorknobs, countertops, and light switches.

Here’s a quick trick I learned years ago working for a hotel. Find a housekeeper on your floor and ask for bathroom towels and a robe, if you wear one, off the cart as those have been cleaned. Housekeepers are typically told not to replace towels if they look clean.

These are tough, mainly during the winter; however, comforters and blankets are seldom switched out and laundered in most hotels. If not for a noticeable stain, blankets are usually taken to the laundry staff only once per year. Additionally, curtains, scrubbing walls and baseboards, flipping mattresses, and other such items are only cleaned once per year.