Everyone loves to gripe about air travel. And I should know. As the creator of a website devoted to airlines and airfare hunting, I’ve read every type of complaint imaginable. But what about hotel rooms? Here are a few simple fixes that would go far to make me, and other guests, happier.
BEDSIDE LIGHTING
I own an iPad, but I’m one of those Neanderthals who still reads books made of paper — and I usually do it in bed (in case you didn’t know, the blue wavelength light emitted by a tablet or smart phone suppresses melatonin production and thus makes falling asleep harder). The problem is that few hotels have decent bedside lighting. The best bedside reading illumination comes from high-intensity, flexible-necked fixtures that concentrate a narrow beam of light onto the page, without disturbing anyone sleeping next to you. Too many hotels give us useless table lamps on the nightstand, made even less tolerable by those dim fluorescent light bulbs.
ELECTRICAL OUTLETS (OR LACK THEREOF)
Most hotel rooms around the world come with either 110/120-volt or 220/240-volt sockets, but seldom both. No problem if you’re just charging your smart phone or tablet, as long as you have a plug adapter, which most seasoned travelers never leave home without. But if you use any appliance without a built-in voltage converter such as a portable clothes steamer, a curling iron, a sleep apnea machine or a WaterPik (my dentist insists I bring one on my travels), you’re out of luck unless you pack a voltage converter. So I was pleasantly surprised to see, during a recent one-night stay at Batty Langley’s, an historic townhouse hotel in London’s Spitalfields neighborhood, that management had kindly installed both a three-pronged 220/240-volt U.K. and a three-pronged 110/120-volt U.S. electrical outlet by the desk, along with two USB charging points. And although I’m writing this from the perspective of an American traveling abroad, hotels in the U.S. should consider adding electrical sockets used in foreign lands, with both voltages.
TELEVISIONS AND THEIR REMOTE CONTROLS
I just want to turn the TV on to watch TV, not the pay movies or the video tour of the property. Hotels first try to sell you in-room movies and other services (relax in our spa after a busy day!) before they show you how to find CNN. The buttons on most hotel remote controls mean nothing to me, they’re all different depending on the hotel, and even when I press them they don’t make anything happen. It makes me long for the days when a TV had a knob to turn it on and adjust the volume, and a dial to change channels. Sometimes I just give up and pretend the TV isn’t there.
CONFUSING ALARM CLOCKS
Although most people now rely on their smartphones to wake them up, how about just a simple alarm clock with an on-off button and one to set the time? I don’t need a clock radio with more buttons and dials than Mission Control, one that might jar me awake at 3:30 a.m. because the previous guest had an early flight and the alarm was still set to “on” (for that reason I usually just unplug the evil thing as soon as I check in rather than try to reason with it). At the famed Park Hyatt in Tokyo, I noticed a while back, rooms come with a very simple battery-powered, portable Braun alarm clock, the same one I have at home: three buttons (on/off, snooze, set time). Dead simple, although I’m sure some guests pinch them.
SHOWER CONTROLS
I can never figure out which way is hot and which way is cold, especially at 6 a.m. before coffee. You too? Even with a 50 percent chance of getting it right, I somehow don’t, and move the control the wrong direction, which always leads to much involuntary prancing and dancing in the shower. This is a simple fix. My shower controls at the Principal Hotel in Edinburgh do it the right way: one simple lever, hot to the right, cold to the left, with a separate lever for the water pressure. It’s brilliant. I even took a picture of it.
THE DOOR ISSUE
In most hotels, you enter through small foyer between the hallway door and the room; the bathroom door is usually just off this vestibule. If I designed hotel rooms, they’d all have a second interior door to block out noisy late-night revelers roaming the halls. How hard would it be to design hotels like this? The Le Meridien Beach Hotel near Barcelona, Spain, is the only hotel I know about where all rooms have a second door between the exterior door and the bedroom.
THE OTHER DOOR ISSUE
Speaking of sleep, which is often why you go to a hotel in the first place, why can’t hotel room doors close softly instead of slamming shut so hard that the walls shake, waking up me and everyone else on the floor in the middle of the night? In October I spent two nights at the Cullin Hills Hotel on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and was tickled to find that my room’s door closed so slowly and silently, as if the hand of a courteous phantasm was in control, that you had to listen carefully to hear the lock’s faint click. Just saying, Marriott.
TOO MANY LIGHT SWITCHES
Another thing that can interfere with sleep: you can’t turn off the lights. In some rooms it takes me 15 minutes or more to figure out how to turn all of them off. How about a single switch that shuts every light off at once, preferably one marked “this switch shuts every light off at once.” I spent 30 minutes in jetlagged stupor in Singapore trying to extinguish one last light, finally gave up, and requested the front desk to send someone up to my room. I heard of a hotel recently where you can tug on a rope by the bed, like the bell pull that Morticia uses to summon Lurch (“you rang?”): One yank and it’s lights out.
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