If you travel enough, there will always be something that bothers you. Sharon’s griped about the behavior of people at airports. Personally, I’m always aggravated when hotels don’t put enough power outlets in a room, but I can forgive hotels for that (well, to an extent) because maybe when the room was designed, people didn’t plugin as many things. My current pet peeve is different and something is so simple for a hotel to fix that I can’t stand when I have to deal with it.
WHATS UP WITH THE PILLOWS?????
Really? Do the people who design these rooms actually sleep on a bed? It’s not so hard to figure out how many pillows you need.
Maybe I’m just a bit of a Goldilocks here. Sometimes there aren’t enough pillows for me. If you have only one queen or a king-size bed in the room, you should have more than 3 pillows. I say it should be a 2 pillow per person norm for hotels.
Of course, some hotels want to show off by giving you multiple sizes of decorative pillows on the bed. Does anyone sleep on these? How do they get washed between guests? If the pillows take up more than 1/3 of the bed space, that’s too many.
Be honest – if you’re like me, you throw those pillows on the floor. The housekeeping staff nicely stacked them in the corner for us.
The W New Orleans French Quarter upped the pillow game with a bow-tie throw pillow.
Occasionally, hotels will get it just right. I wasn’t surprised that the Waldorf=Astoria had their pillow game at 100%. Those were some comfortable pillows.
The Hyatt Centric Key West also gets the pillows right (and they should for what they charge for these rooms!)
You don’t have to be a fancy hotel to get the pillows correct. Even a Crowne Plaza and a Courtyard by Marriott can do it. It’s not hard.
Crowne Plaza Times Square, New York, NY
Courtyard by Marriott Fort Lauderdale East – Fort Lauderdale, FL
Final Thoughts
If the first thing I have to do when I get into bed is to throw three decorative pillows on the floor or go and grab an extra pillow from the other bed (or the closet), you’re already digging a hole for your hotel.
Now, none of these even approached the level of pillow confusion we had at one of our casas in Cuba. The pillows on the bed were the only ones they provided – 2 decorative zebra-stripe ones. That’s it. At least the polyester pillowcases matched the polyester bed sheets in style and texture. But really, not even the towel swans could save them.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
1 comment
It’s a huge pet peeve for me too. The two biggest problems are (1) decorative pillows that aren’t washed and reek of someone else’s perfume or scent (yuck) or (2) pillows that are not firm enough (this is true for just about all hotels as most don’t offer firm foam).