A hotel room is peace and comfort, it’s sleep and it’s a shower. Those are the basics, and everything else is downstream of those principles. There are really 10 things that make the basics of a stay, that every hotel should be providing except arguably in some csaes at the lowest budget levels.
Fail at any of these, a hotel can easily ruin your stay. They won’t get repeat business. They’ll get bad word of mouth. Get these right and they’ll win hearts and repeat guests. It’s really that simple.
Here are the 10 keys to a great hotel stay that every hotel owner and brand executive needs to master:
- Conducive to sleep: blackout curtains that do not leak light, and intuitive controls to turn off the lights in the room. Walls need to be think and there needs to be sufficient insulation so that you don’t hear other guests in their rooms, don’t hear hallway noise, elevators, streets, etc.
- Bed setup: comfortable bed where the mattress isn’t overdue for replacement, quality bedding and pillows, but not too much decorative pillow clutter.
- Functional shower: strong water pressure, functional temperature control, and a design that does not flood the bathroom. Also, the bathroom has a real door and can’t be peered into from the room. There should be quality toiletries – ideally single use, if the hotel claims to care about the environment then biodegradable packaging.
- Cleanliness: This seems obvious but it’s surprisingly rare, the room needs to be thoroughly cleaned between guests and housekeeping needs to service it daily, trash removed, towels replaced. When turning the room all sheets, comforters, and towels need to be changed out and all surfaces cleaned and disinfected. There shouldn’t be hairs from previous guests in the bathroom.
Top Ten lists… oh goodie, just like Buzzfeed used to be…
You forgot a major item. HVAC units being way too loud. Owners cheap out on this and it’s like having a large compressor cycle with a noisy fan go all night isn’t good for sleep. This is the number 1 issue for sleep quality. Yet no one covers this item.
I like when there are peephole cams near the bed.
Nice article, we’re very closely aligned, Gary !!! I’ll quibble with just one: I’d swap out “complimentary bottled water in the room” since I’m OK with schlepping those from the front desk, and instead pick Safety (that would be in my top 3, not to mention 10). I’ll never forget a single sleepless night in a major International Hotel Chain which was close to Newark Airport (which places it in a serious crime area by definition). Unsafe as h*ll, I’ll never do that again.
Good internet and a good TV ideally with Chromecast and decaf coffee are on my list but clean, secure and comfortable top everything
@Matt — For peephole cams near the bed, please consider… Delta Hotels? (@L737, is this the same Matt?)
Comfortable chair. So few have this, even luxury hotels.
HVAC noise comment reminded me of a FAR more common hotel room HVAC problem: the temperature setting has to work. If I set the thermostat to 72, it should be 72. More often than not, it isn’t, and it’s not even close to the set temperature.
And there are two additional required features of shower design:
1) Don’t put the controls the other side of the water jet — or the guet is soaked trying to turn the shower on and off;
2) Always have the temp and pressure controls separate. The guest should not be required to recalibrate the temperature every time.
Shower designers: Ask, hat would Elon do?
@L3 — As far as “Basics That Make Or Break A Hotel Stay,” I thought you’d’ve taken the opportunity to promote ‘Home Away From Home’…
1. Dependable wifi 2. Water and coffee available in lobby 3. A functional bathroom and shower 4. Well built walls so that you can’t hear neighborhoods having a conversation 5. Proper placement of power outlets.
My experience is that the 3 to 3.5 star chains do these basics very well. The higher end chains and “modern boutique hotels” absolutely suck at these because the impression is you’re paying for a brand name or image.
“There should be quality toiletries – ideally single use, if the hotel claims to care about the environment then biodegradable packaging.”
“Water: complimentary bottled water in the room, and not just one bottle or one bottle per person.”
Aren’t these contradictory?
Yes to the comfortable chair! This needs to be on the list. Why is it so rare to find a hotel room with a comfortable chair to sit in? I don’t want to sit on the bed and I don’t want to sit at the desk if I’m not working.
Thermostats that don’t change back to the default temp in the middle of the night
What sort of Jackass makes a comment ripping an article then continues to make several more comments about the article?
Excellent, Gary, I won’t change one line.
And thanks to you, dear Americans, I learn about peepholes and Newark airport vicinity, @Texas TJ, @Matt!
(1) In addition to coffee, I’d add a basic selection of tea as a sub-point on the coffee front. It can be downstairs in the lobby, but I /really/ prefer tea to coffee. I’m also a stickler for milk, not “creamer”, but I realize that’s just me.
(2) I’d also add having some meaningful control over temperature in the room. This falls under “conducive to sleep” but isn’t mentioned there. I’ve had hotels where I couldn’t get the heat to turn off (it was the middle of the winter, so I sort-of get it, but I couldn’t even get it to just run the fan) and hotels where they seemed stuck in “energy saver” mode and the room wouldn’t cool in the summer. I “get” A/C being less of a thing in father northern climates, but there’s a difference between Helsinki and New York City…
Yes, safety is great and so are black out curtains. But none of it matters if the A/C temperature control does these things:
1) It doesn’t work. It says 68 and now that I have a temperature sensor on my phone, it’s almost always 2-3 degrees warmer
2) It’s governed. You can’t get below 68 degrees, unless you call maintenance who ‘magically’ change it. Yet, if you research some common controls, you can do this yourself just like the maintenance people do.
3) It cycles on and off instead of one fan noise.
4) And as someone else (Rice) mentioned, the temperature in the middle of the night resets to their standard 72 degrees (or whatever it is depending on the season). Though in my experience it’s more like 6am or 7am. It’s so annoying- just when you were comfortable, now you are blazing hot.
And we can talk about for days about the shower. Nuclear powered please for higher end and hot. And Apparantly, the St. Regis in Cap Cana, Dominican Republic believes that ‘hot’ water is 98 degrees. In their highest cost suite. I had to show articles to the GM that most hotels keep their hot water tanks at 110! (by the time it gets to the room it’s lower, but stillm you should be able to bath and shower in 104 degree water at these prices). It was ridiculous.
Actually number one is not breathing moldy air. Unfortunately the vast majority of hotels are built wrong and have substantial mold in the walls and HVAC ducts..
Good points all the way around in the post and comments!
@1990 — Bah, nice one! Season 2025 Matt was peak Matt for sure
@Jon Biedermann — If you want a scolding hot waterfall for a shower, come on up to NYC, and stay at an older hotel, where they still use big-ole boilers. None of that Florida-stuff where they can’t handle heat (or spice).
I don’t drink coffee, but I understand why this is important to some. I don’t think bottled water is necessary as a gift. I have charged my phone all the time at hotels, but never once did I use their (typically underpowered) USB port. But, again, I’d put them in a hotel I ran. Im bringing my own bar soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. But, once again, I understand others don’t. The irksome low-flow showerheads many employ anger me. I have low-flow heads at home and get a great shower. High-quality, strong-pressure, low-flow heads are readily available and not expensive. I agree strongly I should be able to shower without flooding the bathroom. I’d prefer not showering in a bathtub, but if you aren’t designing from new, IIWII. Also, I think the one cold, one hot knob setup is expensive to replace. But, I rather like having the two controls (whether one combined or two separate knobs) be temperature and flow. Oh, how many times have I been in a hotels where you swing a control arm through, say 120° from cold to hot, but it is impossible to find the sweet spot where 2° of swing does from too hot to too cold?
@Gary, nothing you want to list about the check in/out experience?
So, we need to let TripAdvisor, yelp, etc., especially the hotel, know theyre not meeting expectations!
@This comes to mind — “I don’t think bottled water is necessary…” Oof. You get-around enough to know that bottled water can be very important for international travelers.
I’ve run into this more times in Japan than in the US, but it annoys me when I set the HVAC higher than the ambient temperature in the summer and it actually turns the heater on… I want it to turn the AC on when it naturally warms up to the set temperature. Opposite is true in the winter.
The Grand Hyatt Tokyo pretty much checked all of these, they even left me with 8 bottles of water and it was just me staying there. One thing that did fail me was the lights for the small room where the toilet is located was controlled by the switch that turned the lights on over the tub lol Took me forever trying to find it by flipping every switch in the bathroom.
Also it annoys me when the hotel HVAC is all or nothing, hot or cold depending on the season, and you can only decide how hot or how cold you want your room. I’ll pick my room temperature, thank you very much. Any hotel like that (talking to you, Europe) I will avoid whenever possible.
Decent lighting to read by is one of my top 10. Mid hotels get it. Not so much higher level
Stayed at an older Hilton property last week, mostly OK. The walls were thin, and on top of that the room had a connecting door to the adjacent room which didn’t mitigate noise.
A family checked in to the adjacent room and was very loud from the outset. I could hear their conversations quite clearly, plus the screaming and yelling from the kids.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was quite “gassy” that day. I just walked over to the connecting door and ripped a couple of really loud farts that literally reverberated off the connecting door.
No more noise after that, quiet as a church mouse!
@WestCoastFlyer — *chef’s kiss*
Another vote for comfortable armchair, which used to be standard. So many newer hotels have no chair at all or else a chair that is all about style and looking good in pictures but is not comfortable for anything more than tying your shoes. I look for the armchair and a bathtub, another thing newer hotels have gotten rid of in favor of showers, which means I have to choose older hotels to get that in a standard room.
I’ve hardly ever had a hotel room immune from noise next door and down the hallway. Worst recent example Holiday Inn Munich the doors have let’s say an overly positive closing action – SLAM constantly.
Aircon is near top of my list – I like the room very cool at night.
If my hotel room doesn’t have coffee-making facility, I go and buy the cheapest electric jug I can find – it solves my thirst!
No odors please of any kind
Don’t care about blackout curtains, but I once stayed at a hotel in Vietnam that had no windows, OTA neglected to mention that. After two hours I checked out, it was simply too panic attack inducing.
In honor of spinal tap:
11. Toilet that actually completely flushes, ideally with japanese toilet seat, and good quality TP. Staying at a hotel now that I would otherwise rate 5/5 if not for their super cheap shopping mall TP.