Tag Archives for housekeeping.
Hotels are ignoring chain rules. Guests book properties assuming they’ll get what the brand promises, and then the individual property doesn’t deliver, choosing to cut costs instead. That devalues the brand, while helping the bottom line of the individual hotel.
This often manifests in properties skimping on or ignoring elite benefits like breakfast. But it also covers housekeeping. And it’s certainly not limited to the best-known offender, Marriott.
Hilton has communicated upcoming changes to housekeeping, bathroom towels, bedside power outlets and night lights to hotel owners in the Americas, which they say are changes that “will have the biggest impact on guest satisfaction” while at the same time “being mindful” of property owner margins.
According to an internal communication reviewed by View From The Wing, Hilton hotels must be “clean everywhere and offer a hot breakfast, a great shower experience and a few reliable and friendly touches.”
An ex-hotel manager tells guests they should put away their toothbrushes – don’t leave them out in the bathroom – because housekeepers may mess with them.
Maybe the housekeeper is in a bad mood, thinks the guest is rude, or isn’t tipping. The manager says that housekeepers may “clean certain areas in bathrooms with a guest’s toothbrush that you don’t want to have near your mouth.”
A housekeeper at MGM’s Vdara in Las Vegas is accused of stealing more than $1 million in jewelry from a guest room consisting of “two Rolex watches, an Audemars Piguet watch, a Cartier watch, seven diamond Cuban link chains, a couple of bracelets and a gold ring.”
Here’s the story of tweedle dee and tweedle dumber.
The problem for hotels with dropping daily housekeeping is that they’re eliminating the things that make them different than an Airbnb and Airbnb has been their primary competitive threat. At some properties it also just cashes out as gross.
Marriott’s AC Hotel in Downtown Minneapolis tells guests just leave your trash in the hall.
We’ve all experienced tipflation: an expectation that we tip more, and more often, than ever before. When you walk up to an iPad to pay for a purchase you know what’s coming next. You’re literally standing in line to pay for something you picked up from a shelf yourself, and you’re about to be asked to tip for it. How does this make sense?
And then you’re presented with choices, maybe 20%, 22% and 25%. When did tipping expectations go so high?
With current service pretty limited – a ‘light refresh’ generally just includes emptying trash, replacing towels, and making the bed without changing linens – there’s not much left to take away. Yet somehow the Hyatt Regency John Wayne Airport manages to pull farther on both levers – add steps to the request process, and perform even less service than a light refresh.
Early in the pandemic there was concern about people entering hotel rooms. If you were traveling you either weren’t concerned about Covid-19, or you wanted to isolate yourself as much as possible from others.
Hotels stick with the line that guests want choice in whether or not to have daily servicing of their room, so they ask guests to request it if they want it.
Hotels want guests to give tips to workers, so they can pay lower wages. The CEO of one hotel ownership group actually said the quiet part out loud.
In 2019 Hilton’s CEO said that even he didn’t tip housekeeping. But now hotels are pushing it, and we face a collective action problem. The practice pushes down housekeeper wages, but if an individual guest doesn’t do it that’s less money in a given housekeeper’s pocket on that given day.
A hotel guest reports that they left their room in perfectly normal order when they checked out. On their way down the hall they handed their key to housekeeping. But after their stay the property charged them a $150 cleaning fee – and sent them photos.
And who boy, the photos are something, with hot sauce everywhere in the room – on the bed and bedding and even on the wall. It looks like blood!
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
