Travelers have plenty of reservations about hotels
Of all the hotel annoyances, the one that bothers Louise Sattler the most is the smells.
“Scents,” she says, “and smoking in hotel rooms.”
Sattler, a psychologist from Los Angeles, is one in a billion. That’s about the number of annual guest nights in the American hotel industry alone. And for every guest, there is at least one pet peeve, and often many.
You’ll probably find yourself in a hotel during the upcoming travel season. Instead of getting irritated, I have a few pro tips for remaining calm and unbothered even when the annoyance is unavoidable.
There are no comprehensive surveys on this topic. A recent Expedia poll suggests guests were most annoyed by other guests. The top offenders: inattentive parents (72 per cent), hallway hell-raisers (69 per cent) and in-room revelers (59 per cent). Complainers ranked fourth (53 per cent).
Another survey conducted by Huno.com, an Australian hotel booking site, found that dirty rooms, uncomfortable beds and bad service topped the list of guest annoyances.
Some problems are easily fixed. Sattler, for example, brings extra Advil on the road.
“Your lavender bath is my migraine,” she says.
Another solution: asking for a scent-free or hypoallergenic room. Hotels strip their signature scents, air fresheners and smelly soaps from those rooms so you can breathe freely.
Here’s my top annoyance: I’m in my hotel room early in the morning, on deadline (I’m always on deadline), and I hear a loud tap-tap-tap at the door, followed by a half-question, half-announcement: “Housekeeping?” “Just a minute,” I say.
But as I close the computer and get up to answer the door, there’s another, even louder tap-tap-tap, and a more insistent “Housekeeping!”
Could they at least stop using a key card to knock on the door?
Alarm clocks rank as Hilary Stockton’s top hotel gripe.
“Those hotel alarm clocks still set for an ungodly hour are so annoying,” says Stockton, a frequent hotel guest who is also chief executive of a luxury travel company.
She always double-checks the alarm before going to bed to make sure it’s switched off. If she can’t figure out how to turn off the alarm — a valid concern, given how complicated the devices can be — she asks housekeeping to remove the noisy timepiece.
Some annoyances are preventable with a little planning. Take slow WiFi, for example, which is so common that I’ve stopped thinking about it.
“Sure, people are on a trip to get away from the internet,” says Sophia Borghese, a hotel consultant in New Orleans. “But if they’re on a business trip or trying to connect with those at home, they need high-speed WiFi at the hotel. Nothing is worse than thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll just get to these emails once I get to the hotel’ and having poor WiFi.”
Borghese brings her own wireless hot spot so she doesn’t have to rely on a hotel’s connection. It also allows her to avoid the daily fee for wireless internet.
How about the perennial noise problem? Janet Ruth Heller often finds herself in a room “near a noisy wedding or other party group,” in which it’s impossible to sleep.
“People in this group shout to one another in the hotel hallway at 2 a.m. when most people are sleeping,” says Heller, who runs a nonprofit organization in Portage, Michigan.
Her solution: before checking in, she requests a quiet room — usually the one farthest away from an elevator and several floors above or below a ballroom. Worst-case scenario? Use those earplugs that the hotel offers you.