Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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BREAKING NEWS: Building Futures Group announces closure.
No doubt you, too, have seen the reports all over the international press this week, featuring confessions shared by hotel housekeeping staff on how they cut corners when cleaning our rooms, to save time. Many of us will have read of such tricks over recent years, but generally when they’re reported in the UK national press, they can sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt, since some news outlets are known to sensationalise the information they’ve uncovered, for their own publicity’s sake.
These latest confessions, shared anonymously on the Whisper app, are likely to be true.
I’ve always been wary of the cleanliness of hotel rooms and would never think of taking a bath or drinking from one of the glasses or cups or using a spoon without giving it a good rub and rinse around first. I’ll also rinse out the kettle before filling it. But how far does one go with this type of behaviour, without being over the top about it?
Many posters said their hotels don’t wash blankets regularly and I have to say that – unhygienic as this may sound – it didn’t surprise me too much. After all, these blankets tend to be more for show and most guests wouldn’t sleep with them next to their skin, would they? I think they ought to be washed more than the ‘once annually’ quoted by some posters but certainly not after every guest visit. That would be a waste of resources.
Other posters confessed to leaving sheets on the bed between guests, simply turning them up the other way or running over their surface with a lint roller to remove hairs and other bits. Now that disgusted me – but surely, when you first draw back the sheets, you can tell whether they’ve been slept in or not, because used sheets become crumpled?
My belief is that hotel housekeepers are generally under such pressure to clean rooms in too little time to do the job properly, that they have to find the quickest way possible to make the room look as if it’s been properly cleaned, when really it hasn’t – and while I can’t condone some of the shortcuts they take, I can’t actually blame them, can you?
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Yours,
14th January 2016