THERE’S a programme on Channel 4 at the moment called Four In A Bed. It’s a competition that goes on for a week, with a cash prize at the end for the winner.
It’s a simple format. Four B&B owners visit each other’s premises, spend a night there, and have breakfast the following morning.
Before they leave, they rate the B&B under different headings and mark them accordingly. The owner with the highest mark at the end of the week gets £1,000.
The participants are competitive. At the start of their visit, the guests inspect their rooms, picking up on anything dirty, untidy, or out of place. These inspections are taken seriously, over the top in fact.
A speck of dust found over the door frame is an offence against humanity. Similarly, a cobweb found on the ceiling lamp shade would lead to lots of tut-tutting.
A single hair found on any of the beds would be reason enough to send for the police so, as I say, it’s a bit over the top.
If you search hard enough in the cleanest of properties, you’ll surely find something to complain about.
At the end of their stay in the TV show, the guests provide feedback to the owner on the different aspects of their stay, based on the performance of the host, the quality of their night’s sleep, the cleanliness of the property, the facilities, and the quality of the breakfast.
The final question on the feedback sheet is “Would you stay here again?”. The aim of course is to get a “Yes” answer.
I’m not a fusspot but I would definitely answer “No” if the place was dirty. Whenever I stay in a hotel or a B&B, I don’t expect to find a dirty room, but I don’t go looking for trouble either. I don’t get down on my hands and knees searching for grime or run my finger over the curtain rail looking for dust.
You never know what a close inspection might reveal. There may even be a few things there to keep you awake.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently who worked as a chambermaid in the hotel industry when she was a student. As a result of her experience, she has a golden rule when she stays in any hotel.
As soon as she enters the room, she removes the cushions, and blankets or duvet from the bed and puts them in the wardrobe. She doesn’t want them anywhere near her body because, she reckons, they’re rarely cleaned.
She has no idea what the previous guests got up to on these things, so she wants them out of harm’s way.
To back up her theory, she says you’ll always see clean sheets going into hotel rooms, but you rarely see fresh duvets or covers. When I thought about it, she had a point.
My friend had other issues with the cleanliness of parts of the hospitality industry too. In her day, the drinking glasses, cups and glasses in the bathrooms were often rinsed in the bathroom sink and dried with the dirty towels. That made me think twice about using these things in future.
Low standards like this might be more common than you think. A team from Upgraded Points, a U.S travel website, analysed the bacteria present on communal features at a range of hotels, from two-star up to five-star properties, and the results were staggering.
They compared some of the most touched objects in hotels to common household items. Here’s what they found:
Overall, the average hotel elevator button has 1,477 times more germs than the average household bathroom door handle, and 737 times more germs than a household toilet seat.
The average hotel door handle has 918 times more germs than a household toilet seat.
Besides elevator buttons and door handles, there are plenty of other dirty areas to avoid in hotels too, like the TV remote control, which is a big germ-catcher.
The chairs in the room usually aren’t cleaned like sheets and towels, so they can harbour germs that are invisible to the naked eye.
Respiratory viruses can linger on a desk for up to four days, and don’t assume that the curtains in your room are clean. Consider the time it takes to take them down, clean them, and put them back up.
An ice bucket can retain many germs since it is often used by guests for purposes other than those originally intended.
A good idea when checking into a room is to take a good breath of air, and if you smell something off, then maybe you should trust your instinct, return your key to reception, and ask a few questions.
It might save you an unpleasant experience, especially if the room was previously used for nefarious activities.
In 1982, three car thieves met up in New Jersey to do a bit of business. They booked into a motel room and, after a dispute, two of them decided to do away with the third guy so they fed him a burger laced with cyanide. They stuffed his body under the bed and left it there, where it was found four days later.
During the intervening four days, the room had been rented out. Guests had complained about the smell, but none thought to look under the bed.
In 2010, in Memphis, Tennessee, a lady was reported missing after she failed to pick up her children from school. Forty-seven days later, homicide investigators were called to the room of a motel where she had been living just prior to her disappearance. Her body had been discovered inside the frame of the bed, even though the room had reportedly been cleaned and rented several times since her disappearance almost seven weeks earlier.
Suddenly, dirty glasses don’t seem like such a big issue.
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