Hotel Secrets EVERY Guest Should Know

Don't use wooden luggage racks

If you arrive at a hotel which has a luggage rack, be aware of what it's made of before placing your suitcase on it.

Forrest Jones wrote on a post on Quora: 'After checking the bathroom floor to see that it appears clean, open your bag there. It's literally safer.

'Bedbugs love wood and they don't come from nasty people, they come from baggage that's been in nasty places.'

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How often is everything cleaned?

Buzzfeed leaked an unnamed three-star hotel chain's cleaning schedule – and the findings are pretty grim...

Forrest Jones agreed that every three or four months rooms are subjected to a deep clean.

This process involves the mattresses being stripped of all linens and mattress covers, left to air for several hours, then flipped over and left to air some more before the bed is again made.

While this is going on, the furniture, curtains and carpets, which should never be more than ten years old, are cleaned. 

Mattresses have a life expectancy of maybe five years, even if they are flipped regularly.

Photo: Dailymail

Some hotels check for germs using a UV wand

Your eye will never be able to check as thoroughly as a UV light which will reveal the full, less pleasant truth.

Best Western hotels now use ultra violet sterilisation wands from Purelight that are used to sterilise 'high touch points' in the hotel such as telephones, clocks, light switches, door handles, bathroom fixtures and common areas.

They also routinely use UV inspection black lights to detect any biological matter, food particles, and more, that the human eye cannot see.

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This is why check-in takes so long

You're desperate to get to your room, but a surprisingly large amount of your info is logged by the hotel before you do.

Systems will scan guests' driver's licences and extract as much data as possible.

Identification will be verified, not just for use with a credit card, but sometimes to check if a guest qualifies for any rates they are given, e.g. if they get a discount through work.

A history check will also be performed, which brings up previous info and whether the person is enrolled on a rewards program.

Following this, a room that matches the requirement needs to be sourced, along with bookings for wake-up calls and extra assistance with luggage.

Stacy Jean with five years industry experience wrote on Quora: 'In addition, even though all of this information may be in the computer already, most of the hotels I've worked at have old systems that require you to key your way through every single step, whether or not you need to type the information.
'In all, it's about 26 steps, some of which require a brief wait (say, to verify the credit card).'

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Check the peep hole

Definitely inspect the door's peep hole when you arrive.

If it has been tampered with or damaged, ask for a different room.

ESPN's Erin Andrews was filmed while she was naked in 2009 by a stalker who removed the peephole from her hotel door.

Jones said: 'After you check your peephole to make sure it's not damaged, missing or tampered with, find a piece of notepaper, tear off a strip of it, roll it up and twist it until it's about the size of a cigarette butt, and 'plug' it in the peephole.'

Make sure it is not lodged in too deeply so it can be removed when you check-out of your room.

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How do they work out prices for each room

Zeev Sharon, CEO & Co-Founder of Hotelied, said on Quora: 'The old industry rule of thumb is that for every $1,000 invested in a room's construction, the hotel should charge $1 in average daily rate.

'So a room that cost $300,000 to build, should sell on average for $300/night.'

Sharon explained that the quality of a room can be determined by the fixtures in a bathroom, the most expensive area to build in guest rooms.

'A standard three-fixture bathroom has a sink, bath and toilet, a five-fixture bathroom is more typical for luxury hotels, and has two sinks, a bath, stand-alone shower and a toilet,' he said.

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There is a protocol for when people die in their room

Tomsky, who worked in two top hotels in New Orleans and New York City, admitted to MailOnline Travel that deaths in hotels are not quite as rare as guests may think.

'It's not something a hotel wishes to publicise, naturally,' he explained. 'So, they are removed as discreetly as possible.

'This may involve flashing lights and paramedics, depending on the severity of the situation, but can also happen via employee elevators and back exits.'
He added: 'Death is a part of hotel life.'

If a death occurs, once the person is removed, the room is sanitised, cleaned and made available to the next guest - and that can happen a lot faster than you think.

However, don't expect much information from the hotel about this. Staffers are forbidden from revealing any details of cause of death and room numbers.

Photo: iStock

Staff don't care as much as you think

For guests who have caused difficulty, it's not unknown for a staff member to seek revenge on their toothbrush or even change their key card to lock them out of their room, claimed Tomsky.

He said he came across staffers who stole from minibars and from valet-parked cars. Often, the mischief that staffers engaged in was purely out of boredom, he said.

Forrest Jones said that housekeepers rush in order to fulfil their quote of rooms, and can get questioned if they take more than a half-hour to make a room, or 15 minutes to service a room occupied by a stay-over guest.

Many housekeepers are rushed, and a lot of the time, no one goes behind them to inspect the rooms.

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Staff look through your personal items

Tomsky claimed that boredom led to rifling through guests' stuff, reading intimate information about them and giggling over their collections of sex toys.

'I found a pretty foul letter left in a room,' he said. 'It was about someone's wife being a whore. It was probably a joke, because there was a stamp on it of genitalia, addressed to a Mr. Cuckold, with details about her sexual activities.'

Photo: iStock

Beware hand towels

'You know where you almost always find a hand towel in any recently-vacated hotel room that was occupied by a guy? On the floor... next to the bed,' said Forrest Jones.

BLEAUGHHH.

Photo: iStock

The hotel has enough for three times the amount of guests

Forrest Jones said that ideally, a hotel will keep three 'turns', or 'par', of sheets and towels, which means enough supplies to make every room in the hotel, three times over.

If an item has a visible stain that doesn't come out in the wash, it will be retired, and if the quality reasonable, it will be dyed red or blue and used as a cleaning rag.

Photo: iStock