It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s enough to make your stomach turn.
You check into your hotel, drop your bags, and everything seems perfectly normal. Later that night, you pull back the covers…
…and realize there’s no way those sheets are fresh.
Maybe they’re wrinkled. Maybe there’s hair on the pillow. Maybe there are stains that definitely weren’t made by you.
Whatever the clue, the conclusion is the same: someone skipped changing the bed between guests.
For whatever reason – poor communication regarding check-out/check-in, not enough time to get everything done, laziness, passive aggressiveness, etc.—sometimes hotel housekeepers wind up not changing the sheets in between guests. It’s easy enough to tell…the sheets could be wrinkled, there could be hairs on the pillow, or (ew) stains somewhere. In fact, I found this on Reddit—apparently, someone left this note under the blanket:
Reddit had thoughts (because of course it did)
Of course, that led to over 700 replies (because Reddit) about how they should have dated the note and the paper was yellow and maybe it was yellow from age, or it was fax paper that yellows faster (wait, FAX paper? Hello, the 80s called and they want their fax machine back!), or maybe it was a stain from something else that was yellow, and whose responsibility was it to change the sheets, and this happened in all levels of hotels, and then the conversation switched to bed bugs and how they never wash the comforters and the hotel that had the squatter that moved from room to room, and then if you copy the note you could get a free stay and no you shouldn’t do that and one person who had feces on his shower curtain and OMG, welcome to Reddit….
ANYWAY…
Anyway…because apparently every Reddit thread eventually turns into a discussion about fax paper, bed bugs, poop, squatters and whether comforters are ever washed…let’s get back to the point.
While you can’t stop it from happening to you, there’s a very simple way to make it much harder for anyone to accidentally (or intentionally) skip changing the sheets.
Before checking out of the room, pull the sheets off, remove the pillows from their pillowcases, and gather them all up in the middle of the bed. If you want to be extra nice, add all the towels to the pile, too.
Regency Inn & Suites via Trip Advisor
Pay it forward for the next guest
Granted, it won’t help you. But it only takes a minute or two, and it’ll help guarantee that the next person in the room will get fresh linens and towels. And there’s never anything wrong with doing something good for a total stranger, right?
Besides, you never know…maybe the person who was in your room just before you read this article and balled up his/her sheets and towels before leaving the room, to ensure that YOU got fresh everything.
Will this solve every hotel housekeeping problem? Of course not.
But it only takes a minute to strip the bed, toss the towels on top and leave everything in one obvious pile. It makes it much harder for anyone to overlook—or skip—the task of changing the linens.
More importantly, you’re doing a small favor for someone you’ll probably never meet.
Maybe the guest before you did the same thing so you got fresh sheets.
Now it’s your turn.
Be a good human.
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