SURVEY RESULTS: Should hotel rooms be cleaned daily?
We recently polled the audience on our YouTube channel, Clean Freak & Germaphobe to find out what they think about a hot topic in cleaning. That is, when you stay in a 5-star hotel, do you expect your room to be cleaned every day? At the time of this writing, and in just 6 days, we got over 1,400 responses! A lot of people expressed their opinions. Fortune Magazine recently wrote an article about this heated debate.
Workers aren’t happy about less frequent cleanings…and as our poll showed, neither are their guests.
A worker who’s been cleaning a 5-star hotel for 14 years says guests are so angry about how dirty their rooms have gotten they throw things and shout at her
– Fortune Magazine
If you’ve been to a hotel lately, you’ve probably noticed that many aren’t cleaning the rooms everyday like was the standard in the past. Why are hotels cleaning less often? Blame Covid. “Daily room cleaning was never a big issue before 2020. But at the beginning of the pandemic, when anxieties ran high about how COVID is transmitted, many hotel guests declined to have housekeeping workers enter their rooms. Fewer rooms to clean meant hotels didn’t need as many workers“
Then there’s an issue of staffing and finding enough people to clean. Not to mention, it saves hotels a lot of money to clean less often. Hotel workers have staged protests over this! In February, members of the hospitality union UNITE HERE protested the shift away from daily cleaning at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. There was a daily room cleaning requirement and the union claimed that cutting back on cleaning is costing them. “Automatic Daily Room Cleaning Supports our Families,” the words on the sign proclaimed.
And with less frequent cleaning, hotel cleaning staff say they see bigger and bigger disasters when they finally do clean.
So we decided to poll our audience on YouTube to find out what they had to say as consumers. Here’s what they said: YES. The majority of people who voted said they do expect their rooms to be cleaned daily. 74% said yes they should.
Do you expect your hotel room to be cleaned every day?
Here are some of the responses:
“5 star? Yes. For the money you should expect more. As an aside, shouldn’t the really cheap places clean daily? Customers are always tougher on a business than any inspection by a boss. They notice the mess behind the coffee maker, the dust on the cabinet door, the sticky stuff in the drink cooler. What I call amnesia bias. You see it every day and stop noticing it. It’s still there, you just don’t notice it. Amnesia.”
– @Bobmiller7426
And there was a sentiment that if they are clean people, they already pick up their hotel room. So they may just need fresh towels. Some even bring their own cleaning supplies with them. “I know too much. I used to work in a hotel. Bring your own cleaning supplies,” says @ktfitz4604
One person pointed out that daily cleaning is a reason to stay in a hotel and not in a vacation home rental like Airbnb. Good point. We don’t have that same standard of cleaning when we stay at a nice vacation home.
Of course, since we’re a cleaning channel, we attract more clean freaks than the general population. But overall, most people do want their rooms cleaned every day — especially if they’re paying for a 5 star hotel.
What I wonder is, would guests be willing to pay an additional cleaning fee or could they get a discount if they opted out of daily cleaning? At least they’d feel like they have a choice. Hotels could offer more frequent cleaning as a perk for regular guests who are part of their loyalty programs. However, there is still that expectation that it comes included in the price you pay, not as an extra. But remember when airlines didn’t charge for checking bags and now it’s a standard practice??
What do you think – should your hotel room be cleaned daily or not? Leave a comment here or go vote on our cleaning poll here
