Hotels have spent years looking for ways to reduce housekeeping costs. At first, some offered guests incentives to skip daily room service. Then COVID arrived, and many hotels discovered they could clean rooms less often while blaming it on the pandemic.
Even though those days are long behind us, plenty of hotels still don’t provide daily housekeeping. Some clean rooms only upon request. Others come every other day. A few have come up with their own unique systems.
At one point, it got so bad that one city made a law that said daily housekeeping would be standard practice.
I recently stayed at a Hilton property – a Homewood Suites in New Braunfels, Texas, and they’ve apparently come up with a brand new reason to not completely service my room.
I had stayed at this property before, so I knew their standards for housekeeping was every other day. I was staying in the room by myself so that was fine; I knew I wasn’t going to use up all of the toilet paper or even trash can space in two days. And even if I somehow did, I knew I could get replenishment at the front desk.
The hotel obviously keeps track of who is “due” for housekeeping because if you leave your “do not disturb” sign out on the day you were supposed to get serviced, they let you know (I may or may not have left my DND on the door, by mistake, on the day housekeeping was scheduled to service my room).
Date:_07 16 26
Dear Guest ROOM 108
We notice that the privacy sign was displayed On your door, therefore, we were unable to service your room.
If you would like housekeeping service tomorrow, please remove the privacy sign when leaving the room.
Thank you for your understanding.
Team Housekeeping
That was on a Thursday. But I was ready on Friday and made sure I didn’t leave the DND out that morning.
When I got back to my room Friday evening, my first thought was that housekeeping had skipped it altogether. But then I started looking around the room and yep, the trash had been removed, I had new towels and even an extra roll of toilet paper. So they had been in there. But the bed wasn’t made and they hadn’t even taken the tip I had left on my pillow.
Then I saw the note on the bed:
Dear Guest,
We noticed personal belongings on the bed. To allow us to properly made the bed and clean the room, we kindly ask that you remove your belongings from the bed when convenient.
Thank you for understanding.
Sincerely,
Housekeeping
Y’all, these (well, this) were the “personal belongings” I had left on the bed:
Yep, my pillow. That’s all; just my pillow.
Go ahead. Read that again.
They didn’t make my bed because I had left my personal pillow on the bed.
I mean, where else would one leave a pillow???
And here’s what really made no sense: this wasn’t my first stay at this hotel. It wasn’t my second. It wasn’t even my fifth. This was my SIXTH stay there in the past three years, the most recently of which was LAST MONTH. And each of those times, I had brought my own pillow (I’ve brought my pillow with me on vacation my entire adult life) and housekeeping had had no problem making my bed, even with my pillow on it.
I will admit that although I generally liked the hotel well enough, it did have its share of quirky happenings last year. But when my husband and I had stayed here last month, there seemed to be no issues. I mean, the elevator had even been fixed!
I was visiting the area with a friend who was staying in a different room. He apparently had wound up with the “room from hell,” complete with an unplugged refrigerator and an unknown leak that resulted in wet carpeting throughout his stay. But he said when housekeeping came to service his room, they also didn’t make the bed – sans note.
So apparently I wasn’t the only one getting the “minimalist housekeeping” treatment.
Maybe this is a brand-new housekeeping policy.
Maybe it was one housekeeper who decided my pillow was simply too much of an obstacle.
Or maybe someone was looking for any reason to shave a few extra minutes off servicing each room.
I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that this was my sixth stay at this Homewood Suites, and on every previous visit – including one just a month earlier – housekeeping had no trouble making the bed with my personal pillow sitting exactly where it always sits.
So unless pillows suddenly became hazardous working conditions sometime in the last few weeks…
…next year’s trip to New Braunfels will include a different hotel.
Peace out, Homewood Suites.
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