Many hotels have stopped daily housekeeping and room service

Don't stay in shit motels masquerading as hotels, silly.

R1 This isn't just shit motels. Many large chains aren't doing daily housekeeping, or say they won't do it unless you specifically request it.

I predict in the next few years, hotels will begin charging a fee separate from the room rate for housekeeping.

It's more of corporate America ripping off the consumer, post-Covid.

You know how corporations have made everything more expensive, and in smaller packages? Same thing.

It's shrinkflation.

Corporations are looking for ways to make everything smaller, but more expensive.

In the case of hotels, they charge you more for less services.

It's the fucking over of consumers, which keeps happening.

We can fight back. Just like fast food was ripping people off, and people stopped eating there? That's what we have to do to ANY company that feels it's okay to keep ripping off consumers.

Just stop patronizing those businesses.

Show them that if they start charging more, and giving less, then you will take your business somewhere else.

Fuck these greedy corporations.

One of the simple joys of being on vacation and staying in a hotel was that you could go out all day and then come home to a spotless, immaculate room, unlike at home where no housekeeping got done unless you did it yourself.

Take that away from people, then why bother staying at a hotel.

[Quote] I used to tip Housekeeping Staff, what I considered, very well $20 a day. I no longer do that.

Good idea, OP. I mean, it’s the staff who decide how often rooms are cleaned, after all.

You need to stay in better hotels, OP.

While good ones may give you the option of not having your bed made every day, or not having your towels replaced daily, you can mention at the front desk (or call housekeeping to tell them) that you want the bed made daily (but don’t need the sheets changed daily) and want clean towels daily (an absolute must for me).

As for room service, any good hotel will offer it, though it may not be available for 24 hrs.

Dunno where OP’s bern staying but nearly all good places still do daily housekeeping. They tidy up and make your bed and remove trash etc, and they give you a bit of instruction on how to indicate you want new towels or linens.

20 bucks is huge. You're essentially tripling their wage. I give five and sometimes get a note.

Back to the issue at hand, it's total bullshit, OP, given that hotels are regularly over $300 a night or more

This just happened to me. When I checked in, the front desk clerk Informed me that housekeeping would not clean/tidy the room while I was there (4 days). She said if I wanted clean towels, I could pick them up at the front desk. This was a nice hotel - not a Holiday Inn Express or a Hampton Inn.

I feel sorry for the housekeeping staff - they are not making tips.

I put $10 out for the housekeeping staff on the day I check in. If they clean, I replenish it with $5 on every subsequent day.

If they don’t, I take my original $10 with me when I check out.

[quote]Take that away from people, then why bother staying at a hotel.

Uh, because you need a place to stay while on vacation?

I try to be somewhat generous in tipping - $5 is in my eyes, more for very basic motel type places.

I will tip $6-7 in a medium level hotel a night and $10 a night in a more luxury hotel or resort.

[quote]This just happened to me. When I checked in, the front desk clerk Informed me that housekeeping would not clean/tidy the room while I was there (4 days). She said if I wanted clean towels, I could pick them up at the front desk. This was a nice hotel - not a Holiday Inn Express or a Hampton Inn.

Where are these hotels/motels? Which states?

They won’t do that, R2. It’s their property. It’s in their best interest to maintain it.

R14 They already have been doing part one of my statement at R2. Have been in several hotels in the last year - local and large chains - that did not automatically do housekeeping, it had to be requested.

As for part two of my post at R2, there's been a big push for consumer laws to stop having a "resort fee" on booking pages and include more of an itemized list of what charges are being made. I suspect at some point we'll see cleaning and/or housekeeping fees added to the list.

[quote]This was a nice hotel - not a Holiday Inn Express or a Hampton Inn.

Name the hotel and we will decide for ourselves.

Holiday Inn Express actually does daily housekeeping so you might not want to cast aspersions.

I've seen this more commonly at motels if you're staying for more than one day, but you can request the bed being made up and clean towels. I prefer less people in and out of the room, but I'd like the bad made and the dirty towels out, new in. And they have to provide more TP, kleenex, toiletries, and coffee etc.

4 days is a long time to go without housekeeping. I guess I'm one of the few who likes this new policy.

I don't mind no housekeeping if it's 1 or 2 nights - it seems a huge waste of energy and bad for the environment to change sheets and new towels every day. Really nobody needs that.

The daily housekeeping always seemed excessive and wasteful - particularly for 1 traveler in a room. I also didn't like when they would take my clothes and fold it on the bed or the dresser.

It seems most places are doing twice a week housekeeping for longer stays - that's been my experience at least. I'm fine with that.

Frequent traveler here, for both work and leisure. To start: yes, plenty of US hotels have eliminated daily housekeeping. It's for a pretty basic reason: guests concluded it actually *isn't* necessary, in most cases. (Btw please don't shoot the messenger: I'm merely conveying confirmed info I've heard elsewhere.) In a nutshell, a remarkably small percentage of guests consider daily housekeeping as an essential, and with the exception of travelers to bona fide five-star hotels and parents traveling with young kids, large majorities across the board do *not* want, or believe they need, daily housekeeping.

R13, I'm unclear why you're suspicious of anything here. I'm not a Holiday Inn fan, but I've gotten that response from most of the larger three- and four-star chains at this point. It's now so commonplace that the front desk clerks don't even mention it sometimes.

In some cases this is due to basic necessity: most hotels are still doing a fair amount less business than they did pre-Covid, and dire changes have been required in many cases for them to merely stay afloat. Business-oriented hotels are still faring the worst by far. Further, note that a lot of these types of decisions are made by franchisees, not the parent company. (In some cases that's a fuckload of properties: Marriott is now the world's largest hotelier, but 90% of its individual properties are run as franchises.)

All that said: this phenomenon is either largely, or entirely, specific to the US. We've *always* been the ones who treat low-level laborers like shit! Hotel maids typically made minimum wage prior to the pandemic, and while few people are even willing to work for the literal minimum wage nowadays, they're *still* among the lowest-paid. In places like Europe, cleaning hotel rooms is an honest working-class profession, and one difference in particular is telling: over 95% of hotel housekeepers in the US are people of color. In Europe, however, it's most likely that your housekeeper – who *does* service the rooms each day, to be clear – will be either a white local or from elsewhere within the EU. Unlike in the US, even a housekeeper earns enough in Europe to support themselves, plus they already have nationalized health care in most of it.

OP, your $20-a-day tip is actually remarkably generous. Kudos to you for that: most people only leave $5/day, and few leave more than $10, and the pandemic didn't change much there. I'm admittedly unsure what you mean about room service: while you're definitely correct about hotels reducing housekeeping, it's been at least a year since I encountered a hotel that didn't have in-room dining, at least among hotels that had it pre-Covid (and note that most mainstream four-star chains like Hilton had gotten rid of it, along with filled minibars, because customers didn't like them). Mind if I inquire where you found a place that eliminated room service?

R15, while I completely agree that resort fees are utterly fucking ridiculous, I suspect they won't be around much longer. They're roughly analogous to cleaning fees charged for Airbnbs: literally almost everyone hates them, but when there's no other choice, there's no other choice. Speaking of which (and finally), Airbnb is in significant part to blame for the continuing hotel slowdown. This obviously started pre-Covid, but people simply wanting less crowding and more "space" (akin to a post-pandemic claustrophobia of sorts) are migrating to Airbnbs & other short-term rentals. (Where do you think Airbnb hosts find home cleaners of their own? Quite a few are former hotel cleaners, now earning considerably *more* since Airbnb requires that hosts pay cleaners or any other helpers an actual living wage.)

I have the opposite problem, op.

I usually ask for no housekeeping because I hate the intrusion.

My room is usually stocked enough at the beginning, that I won't need more towels or toiletries, and I'm fine not having the bed made.

That said, the hotel will usually do a "welfare check" and have security barge into my room, because I have had the "Do Not Disturb" sign on my door for two or more days.

They bang on the door, and if I don't answer, they will OPEN the door, and then say "Sorry, we're just doing a welfare check because you've had the DND sign on your door for a couple of days."

That's really fucking irritating.

OP here, I'm not staying at the Four Seasons or the Mandarin Oriental on every trip, but the major brands at their higher end properties where you expect a certain level of service. I'm surprised by what's happening. I'm usually an overtipper, but if someone is picking up my dirty towels, I don't think $20 is too much.

As for room service (in-room dining) I've encountered this in a few places. Basically, the kitchen closed during Covid and either hasn't been reopened yet or will not be reopened, but the people at the front desk tell you that you can DoorDash or UberEats.

Again, I would expect this kind of service at a Springhill Suites or a Hyatt Place and be fine with it, but not their higher end and signature properties.

Personally, I think for a $400 - $600ish a night hotel, daily housekeeping should be standard and if you don't want daily housekeeping put the DND thing on your door.

In-room dining is more beneficial to the work traveler, but sometimes you just don't want to go out or sit at a table alone

Agree, OP. I travel a lot for biz and always stay in higher end hotels. Frankly, I’ve stayed at Holiday Inns with better amenities than many high end hotels I’ve stayed at in past few years. Was just at a place for $600/night. No robe. No mini bar. Plastic cups. It did have room service.

Same thing with first class air travel. It’s not much better than economy was in the 1990s.

Yes, first world problems, but drives me crazy when corporations plus this type of bullshit. Using “saving the environment” to not clean rooms is just their way of screwing over cleaning staff and cutting their jobs. That’s why I never turn down service—to help keep cleaning jobs. And I tip $20/day, too.

R19 Agree with a lot of your post. Business hotels and extended stay places have definitely needed to reinvent and are struggling.

I live in CA and I know there's been laws either passed or in the works to either outlaw resort fees or make it so that any such fee is disclosed as part of the nightly rate at the time of searching. (Sorry, I know that's all very vague but I know it's been in the works.) It's why I think housekeeping will eventually become a fee based amenity, and one that will be spelled out on the bill and/or in the booking process.

This push, just like the recent change to commissions for realtors, is part of a big push for more transparency in terms of each specific fee. Whether it will lead to true transparency or savings, or just be the same shit on a different shingle, has yet to be determined.

[quote] drives me crazy when corporations plus this type of bullshit.

This is what corporations do.

And it's made worse oftentimes by local franchisees. They're often foreigners or foreign born investors who buy a hotel that's been around for a while, don't maintain it, squeeze all the profit they can out of it while deferring maintenance or investment, and then close it down and sell it/demolish it.

It's why I often try, whenever possible, to stay at a newly built hotel that is clean, functions well and still has many of its original employees.

OP, it sounds like we have rather different traveling styles. I have no problem dining alone – even before the smartphone era, I usually brought a magazine or newspaper – but generally avoid hotel restaurants because, well, they usually suck. (And are seemingly empty 95% of the time.) I think the ability to order food in via DoorDash or Uber Eats is AWESOME! Saves me the hassle of trying to figure out where to go, or having to deal with getting dressed up and going out in what may be an unknown city with shitty weather.

While it used to be standard for four-star chain hotels to have restaurants, and plenty still do, an increasing number are eliminating them for the same reason they're eliminating daily housekeeping: guests on whole don't care about it, and most such operations were money-losers pre-Covid. And while I agree that a $400-a-night hotel should at least offer it as an option – in concept, that is – I'm all too aware of the fact that $400 may only get you a Hampton Inn in someplace like NYC, and its "middle-high end" hotels now have nightly rack rates over $1,000. (The new Aman is $3,200/night.) And all of that is *before* paying at least 50% more in taxes and resort fees.

Perhaps ironically, you're *more* likely to get food from the hotel at a three-star like a Springhill Suites, if only because so many hotels in that tier offer free breakfast. (But I know they've never had formal room service.)

[quote]Using “saving the environment” to not clean rooms is just their way of screwing over cleaning staff and cutting their jobs.

Agreed, but the problem is that everyone is doing it. Also, we still have a dire shortage of labor in this country, so thankfully the furloughed housekeepers have mostly been able to secure new employment. (Oftentimes much *less* hazardous, actually: you do *not* want to know the procedure for what you're supposed to do if you find a dead guest in the room, which happens far more often than you might think. The better hotels have the equivalent of a hazmat team on standby for such clean-ups, but guess who ends up literally cleaning up blood & guts out of the room? (It ain't the owner.)

R1 R2, I stayed in a $500 a night hotel in Crystal City, Virginia for three nights. They never cleaned my room.

The natural result of a society that worships competition. Professional exploiters have to turn on each other eventually.

It can be irritating to be informed that there is no housekeeping, rather than asking if there are housekeeping requirements that I have. I generally tip $5/day before heading out.

OK, this is major "Mary!" territory but when I travel I like to match the hotel style to the location. Beach resort in Hawaii? It has to be top notch, though the Four Seasons has become ruinously expensive. A Ritz Carlton is great but they have become really family friendly which I am, uh, not. These places will clean your room every day and it is nice to come back to a clean place to nap or get ready for dinner. City hotels are different for me -- I don't need daily housekeeping if I'm somewhere where I'm out and about all day (New York, London, San Francisco) but I do like and always ask for fresh towels every day.

I've stayed in all sorts of places, from fleabags to Aman resorts, and my take is that the bed at the Holiday Inn Express was the most comfortable.

R10 I don't understand what is happening in this strange scenario. Except OP is a passive aggressive cunt. That's clear.

Yes, R28, that's "Mary!" territory, but I'm there, too. Here's the thing though: I'm cheap AF. I want nice *and* reasonably priced, and while that was always a challenge, it's now an exceptionally difficult one to overcome. (At least if I'm paying the bill.)

If I'm traveling for work & don't have a rich client footing the bill, I usually book a four-star on Priceline or Hotwire. If it's a city I visit at least once a year, I have most or all of their 4* "hidden" hotels ID'd, and I haven't *not* gotten exactly what I was expecting in at least five years. (It was pre-Covid.) Example: I'm usually in Dallas once a month for work. Dallas is irksome for hotels in a similar fashion as L.A.: even if they have a truly ridiculous amount of available spots, they'll still charge you $30 for parking. Further, they've taken longer to get there than most other cities, but the nicer Dallas hotels (definitely most or all of the upscale boutique properties) are also starting to charge resort fees.

Framed slightly differently: there is one, and only one, hotel in the city of Dallas that is a four-star, doesn't charge for parking or a resort fee, and isn't gross: the Westin Galleria. Since it's a chain, there's no amenity fee. (Yet.) And since it's at a mall, it has literally thousands of free parking spots. My #2 option is a nearly new Kimpton near downtown that has free street parking.

Being cheap in some ways lets me splurge in others. I'm a definite foodie, and while Texas gets a bad rap for good reasons, Dallas happens to have some truly excellent restaurants. On Expedia and the like, that Westin usually runs between $199-$249/night. On Priceline and Hotwire, I've paid between $80 (seriously!) and $110 for a dozen or so stays there, plus taxes (but they weren't terrible).

I am, however, still picky about hotels, which usually makes my task more difficult still. I don't require daily housekeeping, but I *definitely* require quiet, and any hotel with paper-thin walls is one I wouldn't ever visit again. "Quiet" also includes road noise, and you might be surprised how many boutique properties have nearly zero insulation (and definitely no triple-paned / sealed windows).

I'm most picky about beds, however, and I admittedly don't get what you see in a Holiday Inn Express one. In my own experience, the beds at 2.5-star and three-star chains are interchangeable. Four Seasons wins the best mattress prize hands-down, and since I rather specifically like combo down/feather pillows with a down barrier around a feather core, that's exactly what one chain requires at each location in the Americas: Ritz-Carlton. I'm decidedly unhappy with Westin right now for watering down their Heavenly Bed program, I assume at Marriott's insistence: blissful comfort, feather pillows and 100% cotton percale have given way to the same bad cotton/poly mix sheets seen at basic hotels, and their plump pillows were replaced with epically shitty poly-fill ones.

Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues offers traditional service. As do all traditional lux Swiss hotels.

I used to stay at a modest three story hotel in North Beach Miami. I can't remember its name. Right on the ocean. All the floors were terrazzo, or ceramic tile and impeccable. No rugs. The furniture was simple hard wood and some of it metal. All spotless. Everything was so easy to keep spotless and there were sliding glass door and the sea. Bed linens were pressed and fresh everyday in old hotel cotton. Spotless. This place was so modestly priced. This was the 90s.

In the opposite, sheesh the Paris DUMPS I patronised during my 20s. seedy

I don’t doubt posters here who say hotels, even good ones, are phasing out maid service. But I am saying I’m not having it. If you want to rent an Air B&B and straighten up the room yourself and shop and cook for yourself, fine. If you value privacy, don’t like to interact with strangers, and don’t mind walking into a paper-strewn, cluttered messy apartment with your clothes and shoes everywhere, that make sense too.

But that’s not my idea of a vacation. My idea of a vacation is walking into a spotless room every time I come back from being out, and finding the bed made, fresh towels in the bathroom and everything in its place. I also have zero interest in cooking for myself. I do that most every night in my life, vacation is about a big, fat-laden breakfasts provided by the hotel to give you energy for the day, and eating a different place every night.

So I choose to fly business class and stay at 4 or 5 star hotels, since I have low overhead, and don’t spend my money on much else.

Too many killjoys here.

This is pretty standard now. Hotels will only make up your room upon request and will often charge you for it.

And you're carefree jet-setting Helena Rubinstein.

I can’t take a shit on the bed and come back to a clean room anymore.

I work as a hotel clerk for a major chain, and about 85 percent of our housekeeping staff is supplied by a temp agency. All of the hotels around us have been experiencing a shortage of housekeepers since the pandemic began.

For us, at least, the issue hasn't been the company wanting to save money. It's been a lack of employees in a huge industry with a high turnover rate. And if Trump is somehow able to actually orchestrate his mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, you can kiss *any* regular housekeeping service at hotels goodbye. Our industry would collapse.

Yes, I made this into another Trump thread.

Makes total sense, R36.

But the right-wing keeps demonizing immigrants, even though they are the ONLY people in this country who will take these low-paying jobs, with demanding work.

Of course, all of these right-wingers are the ones who are hiring all the undocumented illegal immigrants.

The hypocrisy of these dirty rotten Republican CUNTS is astounding.

Daily housekeeping is not necessary. However, hotels are very accommodating if you need a change of towels anytime, even daily. Just ask.

Blame Covid-19

R38 Is correct. You have to ASK for things now because hotel staffing is not the same.

Just nasty

In 2020, I had to stay in a hotel suite due to my condo being repaired and remodeled. My insurance company paid for it. I stayed there for several months, so I became quite familiar with the place, which was very nice. Housekeeping was once a week, not daily. It worked out just fine. There was no way I wanted housekeeping in my room everyday especially since I had my laptop with me, and I was often working remotely.

However, I was welcome to call for extra towel or soap deliveries if need be, The hotel staff was always accommodating. And if trash had to be emptied, I simply put the trash can outside my hotel door, and it was taken care of with a fresh plastic bag liner each morning. There was no need to have housekeeping in my room everyday. I certainly could make my bed myself. And then once a week on Thursday, housekeeping would come to vacuum and dust the suite and wash the bathroom and kitchen. Maintenance was readily available if I ever had trouble with the garbage disposal, other plumbing issues or just one time, the lock on the door.

And since the the hotel restaurant was closed due to COVID, the hotel provided complimentary breakfast and dinner, five days a week. You just had to go down to the lobby to get it. It was a perfect arrangement.

So stop your bitching.

Corporate greed

R42 You’ve embarrassed yourself

And they’re doing it under the cover of being Green-Eco? When the fuck where you ever GREEN-ECO until the moment you could skim a ton of money 💰 and get away with it

R42 here. I forgot to say that I was staying at a Hilton Homewood Suites.

R44. Why have I embarrassed myself?

were*

[quote]Corporations are looking for ways to make everything smaller, but more expensive. …It's the fucking over of consumers, which keeps happening.

This. Every business is so aggressively predatory now. I don’t mean to sound naive, but wasn’t there a time when a satisfied customer mattered? At least somewhat? Now it’s this weird thing where the object of the game is to just fuck over the consumer to the maximum degree. An example, Xfinity doesn’t even provide CS anymore. You have to go online and start with a bot. I was paying a fortune and got nothing anyway so I cancelled the service, but I just think they’re a good example of what I mean. It’s embarrassing how much they were charging me for what I was getting.

R48 No, Xfinity does have live customer service reps. In the Philippines!

Some of you are way too invested in daily room service. A hotel room is almost always exactly the same - narrow entry, hall with closet and bathroom across from each other, a rectangular room with the required furniture - bed, side table, chair/sofa, desk, dresser, TV.

Same setup everywhere with different levels of quality. I'm there to watch a couple hours of TV before bed, sleep, shower/shave, use the toilet and leave again. I'm not hanging out in a hotel room - there's just not much there for me, unless it's a suite and even then, why?

I believe most hotels will do daily service if you ask. I truly do believe it's an eco thing - I started to see this BEFORE Covid. Now it's bolstered by the labor shortage - which is understandable. Most guests are fine without daily service or prefer it.

If you have to have it, I'm sure you can arrange it before your stay. I don't understand what the big deal is.

The fact that YOU don't need daily housekeeping is not the issue, here.

R50 take your defense of greed somewhere else.

Customers deserve to get what they pay for, and not some cheap rip-off scheme, disguised as being good for the environment.

If you pay for a luxury hotel, then you should get luxury services. PERIOD.

And if people are truly concerned about the environment, then there should be a choice at check-in, where you can "opt out" of services.

But FULL SERVICE should be offered as a base.

Corporations are greedy and evil. You're trying to ascribe good intentions to them, but saavy consumers know better.

Corporations are only out for themselves, and for the bottom line.

Remember when the fee for checked in luggage was just to get us through the crazy gas price hike? Gas prices came down, but the fee remained for those who don't fly 1st class. A lot of places are trying to make Covid level service the new norm. A lot of places made record profits during Covid and they want to keep that money training running. I totally believe that there might be a shortage of housekeeping staff, but the shortage is coming from people not wanting to pay a living wage. $20 an hour at McDonald's has changed the game a lot.

I stay regularly at the same hotel for up to ten days sometimes for work. really don't need daily housekeeping. I even make my own bed each morning as I can't get ready without that being done. I follow the towers "rules" as I can go 2-3 days on one towel. Yet that's the one thing they staff does regularly is give me fresh towels everyday. Even though I follow their guidelines to opt out of daily towel replacement.

I tip $20 per day if and when I have the room is cleaned, and upon checkout.

The housekeepers deserve it, and then I'm their favorite guest, especially because I keep the room neat myself and not messy.

I want no trouble, just extra consideration.

I've never tipped at a hotel or motel. Only cruises where you get to know your cabin steward.

I'm also a member of the $20 tip/day club.

Housekeeping is difficult, thankless, poorly paid work. Given the things they have to deal with, as well as the guests who don't tip it all, I think $20 is just right.

Last year, I stayed at an Omni the day before Christmas eve and left $100.

I feel like, between AirBnB and reduced housekeeping at hotels, you're caught between a rock and a hard place. If you stay in many hotels, you don't. get daily housekeeping anymore. If you stay in an AirBnB, you have to do your own housekeeping during the visit, pay a cleaning fee at the end, and now even have to perform a whole list of chores required by the owner.

I just can't with the AirBnB thing. For me, the idea of staying in someone else's house is too much. At least the shits and towels are washed in that superhot hotel water. The AirBnB is just using a Maytag. There also might be hidden cameras and bugs in an AirBnB.

[quote] That’s why I never turn down service

Speaking of which, where the fuck did my pillow chocolates go?

I think this might also be a case where status may help. I have top status at Hyatt and generally always get housekeeping even at cheaper properties.

Not sure if it's that plugged into to the individual guest or not, but I do know they are pretty good to their program guests.

AirBnB and touristic apartments helped lower expectations and of course COVID was lowered them further.

If I stay in a hotel, unless it'ß a one-night stay, I absolutely want housekeeping. It's one of the pleasures of hotels to leave for dinner and find your room that was cleaned that morning tidied up, the bed turned down, the dirty towels replaced. Simpler and cheaper hotels don't always bother with that, and it seems that post-COVID its a rarer thing. Some five-star hotels are a little obsessive and if you come back before housekeepers have finished your room it can be a very fucking long wait to get back in. I don't do anything in my room that needs more than 20 minutes to make right, but I do appreciate staff keeping things fresh and tidy, especially in an expensive property. I haven't seen much evidence of shortcutting and reduced services in expensive properties, but more medium priced properties can go either way.

For me a quick pass through, replacing used towels, making the bed, cleaning up and tidying if necessary is a pleasure. More than that, a bit showy and unnecessary, even a bit of a nuisance. And much less than that seems like a property trying to short change its guests and charge more for less.

I've stayed in AirBnB type apartments many times, but never in someone's house as R59 suggest. Typically this might be the apartment of someone out of the country for a long stretch; a property bought by a single and held onto when they took up cohabiting or moved to another place; or, as is now overwhelmingly likely, an investment property owned by someone whose holdings have grown to many such properties. For me, they were a good option in some cities, not in others. In the last couple of years I've used them very little, having witnessed the downside of too many touristic apartments in a city. They used to be a good way to spend a week or so in a real residential, close to informal family-owned restaurants, near food markets and large grocery stores, a little removed from Touistlandia and expense account restaurants. Now, in many cities, their benefit is much diminished by overexposure and oversaturation. I prefer to stay in hotels as I used to do exclusively. It's nice to see the rise of longer-term hotels in the past couple of years especially, giving good options for a nice place to spend a week or so without spending a ton of money

they only serve HUNG TOPS like me

Yet at the same time hotels are ridiculously expensive now.

R21, just how dirty are your towels?

Yeah, it sucks. A lot of hotels you can request more service - but only to a certain degree. I'm not messy, so all I really want is for the bed to be made and new towels and old towels taken away every day. I guess if I'm staying than more than three days, I'd want them to empty the trash too. I really don't need them to clean everyday - like vaccum, clean the bathroom, etc.

[quote]My idea of a vacation is walking into a spotless room every time I come back from being out, and finding the bed made, fresh towels in the bathroom and everything in its place.

[quote]It's one of the pleasures of hotels to leave for dinner and find your room that was cleaned that morning tidied up, the bed turned down, the dirty towels replaced.

This specific "pleasure" is both antiquated, as well as rather specific to upper-middle-class male Americans (mostly geriatrics, so this tracks for DL). The overwhelming majority of other Americans have literally never even *stayed* in a hotel that offered turndown service. I literally can't recall seeing it without request at any but a true five-star hotel. In any event, your personal opinion of the industry is irrelevant, as is mine. (Everyone has assholes as well as opinions.)

If you were, say, a woman with children – but given the rank misogyny and constant bleating about "fraus" on here, that's obviously not the case – you'd likely prioritize having a place where your toddler can sleep without being woken up by now. (Yes, dear, I know what you're thinking: "Crotchfruit? KILL IT!!!") Or if you prioritize safety, you might choose to bypass hotels in downtown areas that – for utterly inexplicable reasons – neither have a security guard at the entrance or require a key card to access the floors: my own mother encountered a homeless straggler at one last year. Or bypass hotels entirely and head to upscale residential areas, which is the point of using Airbnb. Speaking of which:

[quote]At least the shits and towels are washed in that superhot hotel water. The AirBnB is just using a Maytag. There also might be hidden cameras and bugs in an AirBnB.

I'm always fascinated by a bit of dictionary-bitch trivia: the people who misspell Airbnb – and it's usually either AirBNB or AirBnB, as this poster said – are nearly always the most ignorant about it. The "hidden cameras in Airbnb" conspiracy theory is just as much bullshit as the "hidden cameras in hotel rooms" one. These are little more than urban myths. Same with the assumptions about "outrageous" cleaning fees and guests being required to do any tidying up: plenty of hosts request few or no chores prior to checking out, and cleaning fees vary widely. We also now have some math of sorts: let's say you're asked to pay a $150 cleaning fee for a four-night stay at an average 1BR apartment. Yes, that's absurd, unless you're in Monte Carlo. But if a hotel charges a $50/night "amenity fee," it'd still be the cheaper option, assuming they're otherwise priced identically.

R67, the official name actually was AirBnB (after it was first Air Bed and Breakfast and before it was changed to Airbnb.) So don't get too bitchy about people not keeping up to date on the company's changing trademark and style guidelines.

R68, they changed the name a decade ago. And if you're bothered by people correcting your grammar, you're on the wrong fucking site.

Over Labor Day weekend, many unionized hotel workers across the country in popular cities went on strike (on one of the busiest travel weekends on the calendar) to protest what these hotels are now doing - as explained in the OP. The local news spoke to a number of these striking workers and the responses from each worker was the same - because of these new rules set forth by upper management, most of these workers were now cut back to 'part time' from 'full time', have lost tip money, and have lost their benefits because of these new cuts in services. With the popularity of AirBNBs over the past decade (especially with younger travelers and young families), these hotels better wake up.