Clean or not to clean?
During the pandemic many hotels stopped providing daily housekeeping as a safety precaution and… to save money. Then, when housekeeping returned, they often did less cleaning in rooms and made it “opt-in.” Hotels claimed this was to promote choice but long before COVID-19, customers already had that choice to decline housekeeping, if they didn’t want anyone coming into their room. So, it’s never about choice; it is all about cost cuts.
Before the pandemic making a ‘Green Choice’ and getting bonus points for declining housekeeping was a common offer. Now, most hotels have stopped offering bonus points. The Hyatt Place at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris introduced a totally different alternative sans the housekeeping option, when it informed its guests:-
“We do not provide the refresh of the room and therefore reduce our ecological impact, by lowering the use of water, electricity, transport of linen. To thank you for this gesture, you will benefit from several options: One drink at the bar, WHO points, or the opportunity to plant your own tree!”
Wonder how much garden space the hotel has to plant trees? If not, what happens if there are suddenly several wannabe gardeners at a given time? Would the hotel dig up the planted trees and have them re-planted?
Pro-environmental appeals in the context of changing room cleaning in hotels from automatic daily cleaning (with the choice of opting out) to no daily routine cleaning (with the choice of opt-in and requesting a free room clean every day) has been there for a long-time and is no stranger to hospitality.
The thinking is that eradicating housekeeping is better for the environment, and for the hotels' bottom line. After all, if you're not washing towels and bedding, you're saving water — and money. You're also not polluting the sewer system by sending many chemicals into it.
Budget and low-cost hotels have already altered the way traditional housekeeping operates. They do not clean rooms daily – instead guests can ask to have their rooms cleaned at an additional fee. A study done in 2019 revealed that cleaning a room in a 4-star hotel involves the average use of some 35 litres of water, 100 ml of chemicals, and 1.5 kWh of electricity.
What’s next? I guess we better check with hotels before staying to ask them if the room rate includes housekeeping services, and if it does, what type of room cleaning protocol? Who knows, there may come the day when guests on arrival would be welcomed with a box of cleaning materials to clean their own rooms.
On October 2017, three days after checking into the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Paddock stockpiled 23 weapons in his hotel room before firing from the windows of his suite on the 32nd floor into the crowd of 22,000 people across the street, killing 58 people and wounding about 500 others. Paddock reportedly had a "do not disturb" sign on his door all three days prior to his shooting spree, so no housekeeping staff members entered the room. Who knows, had housekeeping staff checked his room, someone would have noticed something.
Allowing guests to occupy rooms with the option of preventing hotel staff from entering it at any time during their stay can encourage an element of criminality.
Hoteliers need to think about it.
Ilzaf Keefahs is a freelance writer who enjoys focusing on hospitality related matters that he is passionate about, and likes to share his views with hoteliers and customers alike.
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