6 things that really annoy me about hotel bedrooms

I started drafting “6 things that annoy me about hotel bedrooms”  in my head after another ten minutes trying to find a plug socket in a hotel bedroom about a year ago and I was reminded to make the post live when the same thing happened recently.

A gorgeous hotel, on the Thames, £190 a night for the room with Molton Brown toiletries, bottles of water, notices saying you can call room service for ice, but not one sodding accessible plug socket in the whole room.  You can have the TV sound pumped into the bathroom, you can use the sewing kit to sew on a button, but you can’t charge your phone without moving furniture.

It’s not rocket science that people might want to actually plug something in, so why are plug sockets so ruddy scarce?

And if you do find one it is  never near the bed.   How many times have I had to lie at the foot of the bed with my arm outstretched in order to use my phone whilst on charge?  Or then leap out of bed to turn off the alarm as my phone is plugged in across the room?   So as I lay there thinking of the things that annoy me about hotel rooms the list grew and grew.  It might not be 75 things if I am fair but its a good number

The plug socket thing

As mentioned above.  Please can we have them on either side of the bed.  Everybody has an ipad / phone / laptop / camera battery that needs charging so please can you make that possible without ferreting around behind furniture to unplug a lamp.

No glasses in the bathroom

We were in a hotel last week that didn’t have glasses in the bathroom, so how do you rinse your teeth after brushing them?  The one mug we had each been allocated now had tea dregs in the bottom of it so that wasn’t clean either.  Not only does it mean you can’t swig water, there is nowhere to stand a wet toothbrush.

Hairdryers

Hairdryers in hotel rooms are not those ridiculous things attached to the wall in the bathroom that turn on the second you pull the attachment out of the wall.  Remember those things that they had in changing rooms in the 1970s?  Well there are many hotels that are still using them.    One heat: burning.  One speed: blowing your hair in every direction but the one you want.     I can’t speak for blokes that use hairdryers but for me a hairdryer is quite a personal thing and it needs to work properly or I have a hair disaster.  I want it near a mirror and in the bedroom, not in the bathroom.  Invariably I get up in a hotel room first, and then when I come out of the bathroom and get dressed and do my hair,  Bruce goes in the bathroom whilst I am doing my hair in the bedroom.   I can’t do that if I am burning my hands on the stupid thing in the bathroom.

An actual wall between the bed and the bath

 

Is that too much to ask?  I don’t understand this trend for the bath in the bedroom.   The above picture is from a hotel room we stayed in recently, the second time this has happened.   The first time it was just a huge wooden bath tub in front of the window in the bedroom, with a separate bathroom that had a shower.  Why?!  I don’t want to be in the bath and feel I am somehow “on show”.   Nobody needs to see somebody else having a wash, or shaving their legs.  Plus I always get up early, and Mr B, well not so much.   So the bathroom is the perfect place for me to escape to when we are in a hotel,  he gets his lie in, I get to go and run a bath and lie in to read the paper or catch up on social media.  You can’t run a bath quietly when it is three feet away from somebody else’s  head.  I don’t care how quiet you try to be, water makes a noise.

Tea trays in cupboards

Oh do me a favour will you, stop this madness immediately.  Why?  Why does the tea tray have to be tidied into a cupboard?  We stayed in a hotel recently where the tea tray was laid out beautifully, on a shelf in a cupboard, but on the opposite side of the room from a table near a plug socket.  So you have to carry it across the room, clear a space to put it down, and then presumably have housekeeping do the same the following day.  Why?  What is the actual point?   The last two hotels we have stayed in have both had tea trays hidden in cupboards.  They are hardly untidy so why on earth hide them away?

Three tea bags / Nespresso coffee pods

Three.  When two people are staying in a room.  Three tea bags, or as I saw last week, a beautiful coffee machine, but three pods.  How does that work?  Please make it divisible by two.  And preferably with enough that I can have a cup of tea before bed, and one in the morning before going down to breakfast.  I had to share a tea bag between cups last weekend and nobody should start their day with a second hand tea bag.

Mind you that is marginally better than the hotel in Greece where there were no tea or coffee making facilities at all.  That resulted in me being ambulanced on to the return flight 24 hours later.

Come on hotels, please sort it out.