The Shocking Truth About Hotel Cleaning Practices

First of all, let’s just start out by saying that not every hotel room is secretly swarming with skin cells of past guests, E. coli, and/or unidentified bodily fluids. Every hotel has different protocol, schedules, and cleaning staff that determine just how clean your temporary home is going to be. But just because your room looks spic-n-span doesn’t necessarily make it so.

We aren’t dumb (and neither are you); we know that not all maids are spending hours scrubbing, buffing, and spraying down every surface and crevice of our hotel rooms. But after digging, we uncovered some pretty dirty secrets of hotel “cleaning” practices, hiding in the sheets, on your pillows, across the bathroom counter, in the glasses you drink from—pretty much everywhere.

Think you’re better off not knowing about how dirty the bedsheets are or what infectious bacteria is colonizing on that remote control? Trust us, it’s better to know—and know how to deal with it. And we’re here to help.

So What Exactly Should You Be Looking Out For?

When researching hotel cleanliness, we noticed a few areas of uncleanliness that are legitimately hazardous to your health. Off-the-charts repeat offenders included drinking cups and mugs, remote controls, light switches, faucets and, maybe the most unnerving, bedding. According to the official reports of 2012 and 2013 Canadian hotel room inspections, dirt, mold, and germs get ballsy. They not only hide out in dark, unseen crevices like air-conditioning vents, but can be found unapologetically out in the open. On-the-spot pathogen tests performed in these studies and others found that hotel room remote controls were breeding grounds for thousands of bacteria like E.coli (spoiler alert: that means feces), staph, and the highly contagious—and sometimes deadly—MSRA, along with other dangerous germs. Thanks, but no thanks.

Don’t even get us started on the beds. Investigations done with hidden cameras, the naked eye, and UV lights uncovered some nasty things under the covers: nail clippings, hair, fluffed-but-not-changed pillows, and scores of unidentified fluids (also found on some seemingly spotless drapes). Studies have also found that many frequently touched spots like light switches, telephones, and faucet knobs are rarely cleaned, and thus become popular hosts of pathogen parties. Is it just us or does it seem counter-productive to have the sink area, where we wash our hands, be crawling with bacteria? And speaking of counters, these were also home to tons of bacteria—and for the same gag-inducing reasons you should probably shy away from those shiny glasses and mugs.

Is It Really That Bad?

Okay, we’re all adults here. We can handle it. Here’s the nitty-gritty on why your room isn’t as clean as it looks.

Glasses and Mugs

Those sparkling glasses hanging out by the sink…chances are they haven’t left the room in ages. It seems hotel mugs and glasses are some of the dirtiest and most dangerous item in the room. Why? Because as hidden camera after hidden camera has proven, glasses are too often cleaned in the bathroom sink (with no soap), dried with a towel, and then replaced—sometimes with those pretty little paper tops that make you think they’ve been appropriately sanitized when they haven’t.

And it gets worse. Studies show that a common hotel practice is cleaning glasses with toxic chemicals like window cleaner, or while wearing the same gloves worn while scrubbing the toilets moments before. On top of that, the towels used to the dry the glasses are often dirty. Some maids have been caught on hidden camera cleaning glasses with used towels in the bathroom, or the same towels used to dry surfaces like the toilet seat. Oh, and a hotel employee confessed on Whisper that some pee in the glasses, dry them, and set them back on the counter.

Countertops, Bathtubs, and Other Large Spaces

Travel Smarter! Sign up for our free newsletter.

By proceeding, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Sign Up

We’ve met a lot of people who refuse to take baths in hotels. Their reasoning? Hundreds if not thousands of people have probably bathed in that same tub. Understandable to a certain degree, but we find it much more disturbing to think about the possibility the bathtub could be cleaned with a toxic cleaning chemical and then only wiped down afterwards, or worse, that it might be wiped down, like the glasses, with a towel used to clean the toilet. And we aren’t going to lie, we’ve seen a few loose hairs from other guests that didn’t quite make it down the drain before our arrival. Another surface that seems like a no-brainer for a necessity of cleanliness is the countertop and sink taps, but in reality, because of the high-risk of cross-contamination from using the same towel throughout the entire cleaning process, these areas are also at high-risk for bacteria and other pathogens.

Bedding and Other Linens

We’d like to think that the one safe place in a hotel room is the bed. We spend most of our time in there, between the sheets, cuddled up next to the pillows (ok, drooling on them sometimes). We were shocked to learn that bedding was also something that needed to be addressed. While many hotels change and wash sheets frequently, surprisingly, pillows, blankets, and bedspreads sometimes get left out. In fact, this unknown hotel’s cleaning schedule shows that it only requires bedspreads, blankets, and mattress pads to be cleaned once every three months! OMGross. What’s more, one of the undercover videos showed a maid merely fluffing the pillows, and not replacing them. This has to be one of the most disturbing and unhygienic offenses in the book since our faces—eyes, mouth, and nose—have direct contact with the pillows, putting us up close and personal to any germs, illnesses, or whatever the person before us may have left. Oh, and if you get cold in the night, skip grabbing that extra blanket in the closet. A Whisper confession revealed they hardly (if ever) get changed or cleaned.

Why Is This Happening?

While we can’t pin down a specific reason substandard cleaning practices are utilized at hotels across the board, we’ve got a few good guesses. As we highlighted earlier this year, hotel staff wages aren’t the best. The housekeepers paid to clean your rooms are usually making a meager salary and often are short-changed on tips. Unfortunately, this could give little incentive for a maid to go that extra mile in making sure the room is 100% clean and sanitary. In a similar vein, housekeeping staff is usually required to turnover several rooms in a short amount of time—particularly in large resorts—causing corners to be cut. Think about it. If a 1,000-room hotel has even just half of their guests checking out at noon, and new guests start checking-in at around 3 p.m., that only gives a handful of cleaners only three hours to clean roughly 500 rooms. Think you can fully clean a room in under 20 minutes? And let’s face it, when we are on holiday, not all of us are minding the messes we make. Even if it’s not a large resort, it’s probably safe to bet the housekeeping sector is understaffed.

In addition to low wages and possible understaffing, some hotel cleaning staff may not be armed with the most sanitary supplies. We saw several housekeepers with one bucket for all their brushes, rags, sponges, and cleaners, which almost undoubtedly leads to hazardous cross-contamination. In these cases, it’s no wonder bacteria is on almost every surface. Furthermore, hotel staff may be poorly trained in the proper sanitation methods, or just ignorant to the actual danger of some of the methods they use to cut corners.

Clean and Simple Tips to Help You Sleep at Night

So you never want to step foot in another hotel room again? Don’t be silly. We aren’t going to let this stop us from enjoying hotels —after all, they’re not all particularly unclean. But if you’re really worried, you can rest easy if you adopt these methods sure you’ve got a clean spot to sleep.

• Try packing a few extras like anti-bacterial hand sanitizer, ziplock bags, and maybe even your own cup and pillow case.
• Grab the wash cloth from the bathroom and squirt some anti-bacterial hand sanitizer on it. Wipe down all the trouble areas like light switches, TV remotes, door handles, phones, clock radios, taps, and toilet seats. It may sound overzealous, but it actually can get rid of over 80 percent of the nasty lingering germs.
• Use a hand towel to cover the bathroom countertop before putting out your toiletries.
• Throw the throw pillows on the floor. Most likely, that’s where they’ve spent most of their lives.
• If you are still worried about the remote control, stuff it inside a shower cap or ziplock bag. Voila!

—Katherine Alex Beaven

This article was originally published by Oyster.com under the headline The Truth Behind Hotel Cleaning Practices Will Scare You. It is reprinted here with permission.

More from Oyster: 

• 8 Photo Fakeouts That Are, Well, Ridiculous
• You Won’t Believe These 17 Hotel Photos Are Real (But They Are)
• The 12 Best Bang-For-Your-Buck All-Inclusives Ever

(Photo: Hotel Maid/Shutterstock)

Don't Miss a Trip, Tip, or Deal!

Let us do the legwork! Sign up for our free newsletter now.

By proceeding, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Sign Up