Why Haven’t Hotels Found A Solution To This Problem Yet?

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While I have plenty of things to gripe about when it comes to airlines and ride-sharing services, the one place where I find the most amount of annoying things is at hotels. I think that’s because the problems at hotels are preventable, or unforced errors. A simple change would make all the difference and the fact that a hotel chooses not to make that adjustment gets under my skin.

I’m not talking about hotel thermostats, which they make impossible to set to your preferred temperature, on purpose, to save money. These things are much smaller and easier to fix. That’s why I find the fact that they don’t fix the problems to be annoying.

I’ve written several posts about my hotel pet peeves:

• Why can’t hotels give the right amount of pillows?
• I wish housekeeping would stop touching my stuff
• It shouldn’t be this hard to figure out how to use a shower
• My rant on hotels sneaking minibar charges onto your bill

What else could hotels do to get on my nerves? How about a failure to understand the simple physics of how a door handle works?

Back in the day, doors had doorknobs. You’d turn the knob to open the door. With this mechanism, it was simple to hang something over the knob to alert the hotel if you were still in the room (Do Not Disturb) or if you wanted housekeeping to clean your room. Remember when you had to pay attention to which side of the sign was facing out before both sides said do not disturb?

Now that hotel doors have new locks, doorknobs have been replaced with updated hardware. In almost all instances, this means you’ll find a door handle instead of a knob.

I totally understand that a handle is a more practical device than a knob. You can open it even if you’re holding something in your hand, and it’s much easier for people with limited hand strength or function to use.

So why don’t hotels understand that since they’ve changed the handle design that the “Do Not Disturb” sign needs to be updated as well?

Is it just me, or does this happen to you every time, too?

Even when hotels try to get fancy, like this door hanger at the TWA Hotel, we still had the same problem of it falling every time we opened the door. The extra weight of this made it fall off even easier than the ones with a flimsy design.

The one hotel where we didn’t have a problem was the MOXY in Phoenix. I think that had to do with the design of the door handle and the small hole used to hang the card.

It was a little more difficult to hang on the door, but I didn’t have to worry about him sliding off the door onto the floor.

Hotels, could you please look to replace your signs with ones that don’t fall off every time you exit the room? If you could get on that, it would be great. I could then go back to complaining about why there are no outlets near the bed or why I can’t figure out how to turn on the shower.

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