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THE JOURNAL OF STEFFANIE RIVERS: Hotel Horror Stories
*My mother is the kind of person who likes to attend other people’s family reunions. Except for the time she and my father lived on a military base in another state, she has lived in the same city all her life. So it gives her a chance to visit new places, meet new people while being chauffeured around and collect cool T-shirts. She’s already attended three reunions this summer.
Unlike wedding crashers, she always knows at least one person attending the reunion. She even pays her part of the reunion fee so as to be included in all the activities. The only thing she can’t control is the pre-selected hotel, also known as reunion headquarters.
Even though reunion season is in full bloom, I want to take this time to warn about the pitfalls that come with hotel room rentals. My mother and I have spent a good amount of time in hotels, and I used to work as a hotel housekeeper when I was in undergrad.
Most people have watched undercover news reports about common unsanitary housekeeping practices that occur from one to five-star establishments. Although a visual inspection of a hotel room might put most people at ease, ultraviolet light inspections or video from hidden cameras during daily cleaning tell a different story.
The most common transmitters of germs are the toilet seat, telephone receiver and the television remote control. Never use the toilet without using seat covers or cleaning it yourself. The same goes for the phone and remote control. It seems most house keepers – I never did this, but apparently some people do – use the same damp cloth to clean the bathroom and then wipe down everything else including the inside of the glasses and ice bucket. Yuk!
Most hotel regulations require reusable items such as dishes to be cleaned in high temperature hot water. But if they clean at all most housekeepers just use water from the bathroom basin and call it a day.
Use your own disinfectant to sanitize whatever you might touch.
Another potential germ spreading item is the top bedspread. It’s called a bed spread because it spreads germs all over the bed. Some call it a quilt. Whatever it’s called, most hotel chains don’t change it from one customer to the next. At best it’s changed once a month or whenever it’s visibly damaged by cigarette burns or stains of a mysterious nature. Yikes!
When I stay in a hotel the first thing I do after I put down my luggage is remove the spread from the bed. I don’t sit on it and I don’t sleep under it. I use disinfectant wipes everywhere and I wear shower shoes around the room.
The truth is as much as I like to travel, I’m never really comfortable in a hotel room because there's something always there to remind me that someone else was there before me. In Roanoke, Virginia it was the half-eaten crab legs discarded behind the night stand.
Steffanie Rivers is a free-lance journalist living in the Dallas, TX metroplex. Send your questions and comments to her at teamtcbadvertising@hotmail.com.
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