At my German hotel, you are asked to leave a sign on the door if you do not want your room cleaned for whatever reason. Cleaning the room is the default.
This is a good approach that is, unfortunately, disappearing in North America. Since COVID, hotels have become grimly opposed to cleaning rooms. Even during long stays of over a week, you often have to battle the unfriendly hotel receptionists to get the room cleaned. Many hotels have byzantine procedures for guests to request room cleaning. At one hotel, I was told that I had a short window of opportunity in the morning to put in my request. I was there for work and scheduled to, you know, work at that time, so I didn’t get a maid to come by even once during my stay.
Overall, the service industry in North America went downhill after COVID. Restaurants push QR codes at a person, forgetting that in lockdown people learned to cook and don’t go to restaurants just to eat. They go for ambiance, and if that sucks, they won’t come. Many restaurants went out of business in my town because there’s no demand for indifferent service and an absence of Norma menus.
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“hotels have become grimly opposed to cleaning rooms”
that makes no sense from either a health viewpoint (the longer dirty towels and sheets are left in the room the more unhealthy and the longer) or longterm economic pov (daily cleaning is also a kind of daily maintenance and it means the room will take longer to clean when they do get around to it).
“service industry in North America went downhill”
Americans don’t have much in the way of natural defenses against “It’s progress!” or “More convenient!” (even when the ‘progess’… isn’t and even when the new convenience is far more inconvenient).
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Hotels like to put in rooms long, didactic messages about how cleaning is bad for the environment. It’s very annoying to be lectured about global warming while sitting in a messy room where you’ve run out of toilet paper like some poor Soviet schmuck.
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“Cleaning the room is the default”
Weird question…. Who’s the cleaning staff (in demographic terms)?
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Even though the restaurant is in a heavily immigrant area next to the railway station, everybody I saw working at the hotel is very ethnic German. It gives me a chance to practice my German, which is great. Migrants use English to talk to me and confess that their German is very poor. I go everywhere on Uber, and it’s about 80% migrant drivers. Turkey and Arab countries, judging by the names.
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“everybody I saw working at the hotel is very ethnic German”
Kind of tracks with my experience (not so recent) of German hotels….
Weirdly in Malta the last two Christmases room-cleaning seems to have largely been taken over by males (South Asian as far as I can tell). That was in two different places…
Weird.
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“Everything costs more for worse goods and service and in my day… [ old price, what I could get]”.
At what point did this become part of your conversation as an adult? I’m wondering when this transition happened for everyone.
I’ve become cranky – I went full Karen on a rep six months ago and exclaimed I had been using that service longer than they’d been alive and asked them what was the point of their service. No cussing or personal insults, just extremely polite sarcasm. They responded by telling me about cruise discounts. :-p
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