Hilton has eliminated daily housekeeping at formerly full service U.S. hotels. As their CEO explains the strategy, it’s all about lowering costs while retaining high room rates,
The work we’re doing right now in every one of our brands is about making them higher-margin businesses and creating more labor efficiencies, particularly in the areas of housekeeping, food and beverage, and other areas. When we get out of the crisis, those businesses will be higher margin and require less labor than they did pre-Covid.
Hilton’s CEO didn’t tip housekeepers either by the way.
I wrote about how a hotel housekeeper averted a mass shooting over July 4th at the W Chicago Lakeshore. In response several readers pointed me to the hotel housekeeper who foiled a possible Las Vegas-style shooting during the baseball All Star game in Denver.
Police feared a “Las Vegas style shooting” during the All-Star Game in Denver after receiving a tip from a maid working at a hotel not far from Coors Field, who discovered more than a dozen weapons and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition inside one of the rooms Friday night.
Multiple informed law enforcement sources connected with the investigation told Denver7’s Liz Gelardi and Denver7 chief investigative reporter Tony Kovaleski that they intercepted the weapons inside a room on the eighth floor of the Maven Hotel as All-Star Game celebrations get underway.
These two incidents, within a week of each other, come right on the heels of Hilton’s announcement that housekeepers will no longer be going into rooms daily unless the shooters ask them to requested.
- Tired: Hotel housekeepers need to enter rooms every day to make sure there’s no terrorism or sex trafficking (Hilton in 2017)
- Wired: Covid is a great excuse for cost-cutting. (Hilton in 2021)
- Inspired: The class action lawsuit which will follow the next mass shooting from a hotel room that could have been stopped if a housekeeper had tried to enter the room.
Of course it’s not like the wall-mounted toiletry dispensers were being cleaned anyway.
There are reasonable arguments in favor of housekeeping, but “they can see guns in the room” isn’t one
“Another Hotel Housekeeper Averts Mass Shooting…” Nice click bait Gary. According to FBI there’s no evidence they were planning anything yet you title implies it was a certainty.
“more than a dozen weapons and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition inside one of the rooms”
what’s so unusual about that? [\sarcasm]
While I agree that this is both unjust and blatantly stupid, you seem to think that Hilton’s CEO is not a piece of crap who’s actively working to worsen things for customers when evidence consistently shows that that is his clear intent. In short, he doesn’t care what you, I, or other customers think. It’s the Arne mentality.
In a more violent world every alert team member matters
The more eyes and ears around the safer we will all be
It seems these so called critical genious thinkers are working in over drive
to cut costs long term to make up for Covid losses
I’m sure Marriott will copy and continue their benefits cuts and devalued points currency program as Hilton will until there is next to nothing left
Its just going to be buying a room as they are all becoming the same with poor standards and inferior value
Yet we will vote with our feet and wallets where we park ourselves
at night in any hotel we end up choosing 🙂 I’m out
Nightly housekeeping service is a basic expectation for hotel stays.
No sympathy for cost cutting on services while hotels are charging peak rates at many properties
It isn’t housekeeping job to look for criminal activity. Hotels used to hire security people that monitored for bad behavior and looked for red flags. Heck most of my experience lends me to believe that housekeepers are criminals themselves without legal working papers.
Yet for some reason housekeeping missed the white briefs hanging in the lamp at one hotel I was at. Also missed the 10 day old milk in the refrigerator.
Two things can be true:
1) Daily housekeeping should be given. It’s ridiculous it isn’t.
2) This is a garbage clickbait article. “It’s the maids job to ensure there isn’t a mass shooting” is a hell of a take. Especially using a “thwarted attempt”; which the FBI themselves said it wasn’t, as the ‘example’.
But Gary Leff, travel blogger, knows more than the FBI, I’m sure.