⚜️ As someone who spends well over 100 nights a year in hotels, I thought it was high time to put together a post with my thoughts about what every hotel room should offer (and what they definitely should not) in addition to all the basics like free WiFi, good personalized A/C and heating, and, you know, running water. Some of these are obvious – with the proliferation of lightweight laptops, smartphones, tablets and more, every hotel room should have an abundance of power outlets – while others might be more TPG-specific. However, these are things I’d like to see in every hotel room I book in the future, and feel free to share your own wish list below.
1. Power outlets galore. As I mentioned, we all travel with tons of gadgets these days, from computers and tablets to phones, cameras, music players and more, and the one thing they all have in common is that they must be charged. So it’s astonishing to me how many hotels still lack more than one or two outlets for guest use – you know, where lamps, phones and other odds and ends aren’t already plugged in. Not only that, but every hotel room should have bedside outlets. So many people tote their computers to bed to work while on the road for business, and so many use their Smartphones as alarm clocks (probably because hotel alarm clocks can be so byzantine to operate) that it just makes sense to have outlets near the bed that you can access without ripping the mattress away from the wall. Tons of lamps even come with outlets in their bases to make things easier. Hotels, take note, this should be a standard feature in your rooms.
2. A Nespresso machine. Call me a caffeine fiend, but I believe that every hotel room should have some sort of miniature coffee or espresso machine. Oftentimes, that’s all I want in the morning before grabbing something on the go from a lobby shop or a nearby cafe. I just want to be able to enjoy my first cup of the day in my room as I go through emails and my calendar without having to get dressed, leave the hotel and pick up coffee somewhere else. Or tea. Put in an electric kettle and some tea bags for the tea-drinkers out there. Who knows, maybe I’ll be feeling so productive I’ll order room service and up your revenue with a full-on breakfast if I feel like I’m getting a lot done.
3. A shower that doesn’t take advanced calculus to figure out how to work. Hotel showers can be glorious. Indoor showers, outdoor showers, showers with 12 showerheads, steam showers, rainfall showers…they’re all just wonderful. Except for one thing: so many of them are impossible to operate! Personally, I’m an old-fashioned, one knob for cold water and one for hot and you turn them to adjust the pressure and balance of temperature kind of guy. But so many hotel showers these days have temperature controls, pressure controls, controls to determine which showerhead is operating…I often find myself getting blasted with a rocket of cold water from one direction and volley of scalding drops from another these days. I mean, I love options as much as the next person, but can we please make these things easier to operate so I can get in, clean up and get out? And not to be too American about this, but would it be possible to include both Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures on the knobs? I can do simple arithmetic on the fly with the best of them, but I don’t want to have to panic and try to figure out why 47 degrees is so hot.
4. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Call it a symptom of always being on the road, but I forget a toothbrush and toothpaste a lot when I travel and it would be such a nice surprise to find a mini travel kit in my hotel room when I arrive. If airlines can do it in amenity kits – and I’m not just talking business and first class ones here, but some airlines offer it in economy as well – then hotels can provide a mini oral hygiene set to guests.
5. Free water bottles. It’s midnight. You’re off a really long flight. You’re parched. All the stores are closed. All you want is a bottle of water, especially if you’re in a place where the water might not be potable for you. Any water will do – it doesn’t have to be Evian – but your only choices are in the minibar and they each cost $10. Why is that? Hotels need to start offering guests two free water bottles per day (that’s the other thing – even if you get a couple free bottles, it’s a one-time thing with a lot of hotels – once you drink them that’s it!). We would all appreciate it, and it’s such a simple provision.
6. A room service menu that doesn’t take 20 clicks on the TV screen to navigate and order from. This is another old-fashioned quirk of mine, but as much as I love new technology, sometimes just having a paper menu and calling down to room service is just so much easier than trying to learn to navigate a hotel’s “state of the art” television ordering system. If you’re going to put such a system in place, put an iPad in my room and let me order from there, which is so much easier.
To be continue...
Persian
