FOLLOWING my previous rant about random things I hate in hotels, a couple of friends, colleagues and industry contacts shared their hotel-related pet hates with me. Some points didn’t surprise me much but others left me slightly baffled. I found myself agreeing strongly with Bob Kalsey, the Calfifornia-based writer and filmmaker, who recalled staying in a hotel room which featured an alarm clock with a halogen powered digital display that could be read even with closed eyes. Many times, I’ve unplugged alarm clocks or covered telephones with towels simply because the displays were overly bright. Bob made me laugh when he recounted how another hotel he stayed in provided four identical small bottles of personal care liquids, with four-point text on their labels to hint at their contents. He highly recommends wearing your eyeglasses in the shower in such cases, lest you do as he did and wash your hair with hand lotion. Silly him, though Bob assured me that it washed out okay with what he later discovered to be mouth wash. While we’re in the bathroom, why is it that follow-up call from the front desk always occurs when you’re in there? I appreciate reception calling to check everything is in order, but would welcome such calls even more if I had a little extra time to settle in. Please don’t tell me to answer such courtesy calls from the telephone many hotels provide in their bathrooms! By the way, why is it that hotel bathroom phones always look like they were made just a couple of years after WW2 in a factory in some God-forsaken spot in the middle of Siberia? I have stayed in some very stylish hotels with beautifully designed rooms and stunning bathrooms only to find the usual Soviet-style telephone installed next to the toilet. Let’s get out of the bathroom and into bed! I normally stay in a hotel room to get a good night’s sleep. Why then do hotels provide pillows that are too soft or too small? I’m paying $100 to $400 a night for a pillow and a comfortable mattress, yet some hotels give me $10 pillows. Go figure. Talking about pillows, some hotels these days really do go overboard and I frequently stay in rooms with more pillows on the bed than amenity bottles in the bathroom. When removed, the surplus pillows reduce the guest-usable room area to the corridor between the wardrobe and the bathroom. A business traveller from the US wrote to me a while ago complaining about towels made creatively into animal shapes on his bed at arrival or turn-down. Personally, I like this kind of stuff and think it’s a nice way to show off the creativity of your room attendants, so the gentleman’s remarks left me a little perplexed. Mind you, even he had to admit that he wasn’t really sure why decorative towel shapes annoy him, though he was adamant they do. He said that, especially after a long day travelling to get to a hotel, he always feels that they are making fun of him, and ‘know’ something he doesn’t… By the way, I also hate hotels that feature in-room safes that are almost big enough to hold my laptop. Oh, and if the curtains in your hotel rooms can be opened and closed at the touch of a button, please provide a manual override option. I once waited a long while to enjoy the beautiful views over Singapore from my hotel suite while a member of the hotel’s maintenance team struggled to fix a short-circuit in the curtain Do you have any pet peeves when staying in hotels? Feel free to share them with me via info@iconsulthotels.com or on www.facebook.com/iconsulthotels. Speaking out
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By Martin Kubler