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Rant: Consecutive One Nights in a Hotel?

I read this article and now I'm convinced that people do not think before they speak.

First, I don't know exactly HOW to read the article, but I can divine two possible interpretations:

  1. Not cleaning after each night increases odds of improperly cleaned rooms
  2. Sense of entitlement to ritual cleanings combined with a lack of understanding of economies of scale
I don't know which is implied because there are elements of each which are complimentary and at odds with each other. Either you're mad because YOUR filth is not being cleaned up nightly or you're mad because the hotel ITSELF is generally filthy. While neither is mutually exclusive, the act of changing rooms nightly as a way of avoiding one issue or the other IS mutually exclusive. And so using both arguments for the same complaint makes little sense.

To tackle that inconsistency; if you're changing rooms for both reasons you're A) creating more work for the cleaning staff and thus reducing their capacity (making dirty rooms more likely) AND you're increasing the number of rooms you're staying in, also increasing the odds of staying in one which was not properly cleaned in the first place. You only avoid staying in your own filth longer.

You can't have both.

From the cleaning staff perspective, I do understand that some times messes don't scale linearly with time. Realistically though, I have my doubts that the AVERAGE room cleaning scales worse than linearly with number of days. (IE - I don't believe that the average room that skips a day of cleaning is 2x or more time and product consuming than after a single day or 3x for 3 days and so on)

Of the things mentioned for instance:
  • Sawdust - Firstly.... What?!@^!#%^ Is this REALLY something so common you need to include it in this argument? I have a SERIOUSLY hard time believing that the average hotel guest is leaving huge amounts of sawdust in the rooms. And I have an even harder time understanding how this is a problem which scales more than linearly. Sawdust is a light material which can be vacuumed. Staff will already vacuum the entire room between guests. And this is one of the longer chores. If the staff cleaned daily and there was enough sawdust each day, they would be performing one of the longest tasks each day. If it is just performed at the end or every 2-3 days the amount of time spent cleaning as a result of "sawdust" drops drastically.
  • Crumbs - Much more plausible to exist. But, once again this is either a vacuum problem if on the floor or a changing the bed entirely problem if on the bed. And once again, that is one of the largest jobs and it makes no difference if the amount of crumbs is one day's worth or multiple.
  • Syrup - Not sure what the complaint here is. Yes, things like this can harden and become harder to clean over time. But, this only really applies if it happens earlier in the stay and the "offence" is not repeated AND the spent cleaning the particular substance is non-linear with the number of days. This one is "possible", but mathematically hard to prove and would need to be a super common issue to drastically impact overall cleaning times.
The only thing mentioned in the article which would 100% guarantee drastically increase cleaning times is the exact thing which the person in the article suggested; Switching rooms every night. By changing rooms every night you force the cleaning staff to COMPLETELY clean each room you left, leaving ZERO room for optimizing of the cleaning.

And, furthermore, if the complaint is hotels in general are dirty? Well, then we need to assign each room in the hotel a score from 0-100 on how dirty they are. The more times you switch rooms, the higher your odds of ending up in a "dirtier than average" room.

In my opinion, the side-rant about how inefficient it is to not clean every day is just a vain attempt to rationalize a bad behavior.

Clearly, if the typical hotel were having significant issues with maintaining cleanliness levels then the hotels really would be randomly filthy and this intrepid room jumper would regularly be finding themselves in cesspools and would likely have changed their strategy.

Much more likely that rather than being shamed for being wasteful and asking for their room to be cleaned daily they choose a path which guarantees they get it, at maximum cost to the environment and with an amount of effort and waste which exceeds any and all pre-pandemic level of tidying. 

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