Many hotels don’t really change the towels and sheets between guests if the towel is still hanging in the bathroom and the bed doesn’t look slept in. Sometimes housekeepers will clean the glass cups with the toilet bowl cleaner. And don’t even think about leaving out your toothbrush on the bathroom counter.
- Housekeepers are increasingly under a lot of pressure to clean more rooms than ever, faster than ever, as hotels try to cut down on labor costs.
- There’s a brand standard way of cleaning a room, and then there’s on the ground reality when nobody’s looking. It’s only natural to cut corners.
- But sometimes the corner-cutting is even baked into the training.
A reader sends along this video from a franchised Marriott. It appears that when the video was posted, the property was Point Clear, Alabama’s Marriott Grand hotel – since rebranded as an Autograph Collection property. It appears to be from the management company.
Ever wonder how hair gets in random places? The video shows the housekeeper using her bare forearms to fold linen for the bed and put it on the cart. So those little pieces of hair on sheets could very well be a housekeeper’s hair.
The video never instructs the housekeeper to change gloves. So we have a housekeeper wearing one pair of seemingly unchanged gloves. She touches rags, uses the toilet scrub brush handles chemicals, touches surfaces, handles in-room amenities, etc.
The same towel or rag used to clean surfaces with chemicals is used on the drip tray in the coffeemaker. See about the 3:17 mark.
You see the what appears to be the same towel or rag used to clean multiple services. Maybe they’re changed, maybe they aren’t. Chances are they aren’t.
Remember that this video is training housekeepers. Everything should be perfect. This is what they aspire to. And the video long predates the pandemic, after which things in hotels got worse.
If this is the baseline, then the overworked housekeeper is only going to cut corners from there. Imagine if you don’t tip!
It’s always a Marriott.