Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of nights in hotels. First when I was working as a flight attendant and later as a pilot, with countless hotel stays on layovers, and then there’s all the traveling I’ve done in my own time.
I’ve stayed everywhere from cheap hostels in Hong Kong to five-star luxury resorts, so by now I know how good a hotel stay can be when they really get things right. I’ve also become very aware of the things that annoy me.
Here are some of them:
Glass doors or glass walls in the bathroom
Why? Even when you know your travel partner really well, it’s just annoying. You hear everything and see most of it, and I have a hard time understanding who ever thought this was a good idea.
My worst experience was in Bali, where we had booked what was supposed to be a suite at a dive resort. When we got to the room, we discovered that the “bathroom” was basically just a corner of the bedroom enclosed by glass. The glass didn’t even go all the way to the ceiling, and there was no door.
The staff kept insisting it was “European style” while we packed our suitcases and went looking for somewhere else to stay.
Bad water pressure in the shower
Few things can make an otherwise nice hotel room feel quite as disappointing as a shower with a pathetic little trickle of water coming out of it.
Even worse is when the temperature has a mind of its own. One minute the water is freezing, so you turn up the heat a little, and ten seconds later it’s scalding hot. You turn it down again, it gets cold, and there you are, dancing back and forth under the shower.
I don’t need a rainfall shower or a spa experience. I just want decent water pressure and a temperature that stays more or less where I set it.
One soap for everything
I really hate it when hotels, often in the name of being environmentally friendly, put one big, ugly dispenser in the shower with a mysterious product that supposedly works as body wash, shampoo, and conditioner.
I have absolutely nothing against dispensers. In fact, they make much more sense than all those tiny single-use bottles. But can we at least have separate shampoo, conditioner, and body wash?
Even a really nice hotel can suddenly feel incredibly cheap when the bathroom comes with one mystery soap for everything.
The old-fashioned minibar with sensors
You know the kind. Every little bottle and can has its own spot with a sensor underneath, so the hotel knows the second you pick something up.
Not only does this make the fridge completely useless if you have something of your own that you want to keep cold, it also makes me feel like a potential criminal every time I open the door. Better not move that $8 Coke three inches or you might suddenly own it.
Thankfully, these minibars seem to be disappearing. I come across them less and less often, and this is definitely one hotel feature I won’t miss.
Hotels that inspect the room before you can check out
I’ve experienced this mostly in Asia, at everything from very cheap hotels to luxury resorts.
You go down to reception to check out and are told to wait while someone goes upstairs to inspect the room. Sometimes they present it as a service to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything, but we all know they’re really checking that you haven’t taken a bathrobe or smashed a glass.
I’ve even stayed at hotels where there’s a price list in the room telling you exactly how much you’ll be charged if various things disappear or get broken.
I understand why hotels do it. I’m sure there are guests who steal anything they can get their hands on, and if you regularly have to replace bathrobes and comforters, it quickly becomes expensive. But as a guest, I really think it takes something away from the experience when you’re treated like a potential thief on your way out the door.
Construction noise nobody told you about
This is just not okay. And it’s also incredibly stupid. Do they really think you’re not going to notice someone drilling into concrete from 9am to 4pm?
Of course you can always go and find another hotel, but that’s really the last thing you want to deal with when you arrive tired and jet-lagged and all you really want to do is crawl into bed. Instead, you have to argue with the hotel, contact the booking site, find somewhere else to stay, and move. It’s a terrible way to start a vacation.
I usually spend a lot of time choosing a hotel and do plenty of research before I book, so it annoys me even more when a hotel has conveniently forgotten to mention something as significant as a major construction project. If I had known about it beforehand, I would simply have booked somewhere else.
No master switch for the lights
I love hotel rooms with a switch next to the bed that turns off all the lights except the bedside lamps.
The opposite is a room with 14 different lamps, all of which the hotel has of course turned on before you arrive. Then bedtime comes around and the hunt for light switches begins. One behind the desk. Another underneath the nightstand. A third hidden behind the curtain.
Steve and I once stayed at a hotel in Phnom Penh where we simply could not figure out how to turn off the light inside the closet. We spent an absurd amount of time searching for a switch and trying everything we could think of before eventually calling reception.
It turned out there was a tiny touch sensor that you had to tap with your finger to turn the light on and off.
Of course.
Which brings me to my next point.
When everything gets too technical
In recent years, I’ve stayed at several hotels where almost everything in the room is controlled from a tablet, the lights, the temperature, the curtains, and the TV.
On paper it sounds smart but in reality, my experience is that it rarely works as well as it should. You tap “lights off,” and two lamps turn off while a third starts blinking. You want the room at 68°F, but the tablet has lost its connection to the air conditioning, or the battery is about to die just as you’re getting ready for bed…
Five minutes later you’re furiously tapping the screen and wondering how much trouble you’d get into if you threw the tablet out the window.
I have nothing against technology in hotel rooms, quite the opposite. But it really needs to work, and if it doesn’t, there should be a manual alternative. Is a regular light switch on the wall too much to ask for?
