Hotels – what makes a perfect stay

When was the last time you left a hotel vowing that you would tell everyone who would listen (and those who wouldn’t too) about your experience? Whether exceptionally good or disastrously bad, stories of nights spent in quirky, opulent or offensive accommodation make for a great subject to share with friends. For hotel managers, like it or not, how your customers experience your service will be retold many times; not just on Trip Advisor and other online forums, but also over dinner, in the pub and in idle chatter to anyone who your customer will meet.

So how do you ensure that your story is told to your advantage? I will present the results of my focus group consisting of one traveller. My needs for a satsifactory hotel stay are simple, and I believe they are also fairly typical. Yet having stayed in hundreds of hotel rooms around the world, my experience is that they are rarely met. Here’s my wish list – I would be interested to know if others agree.

Things that matter to me:

Cleanliness – a clean room is a must. Dirty bedding or furniture creates an irredeemably bad impression, yet is so often present. As for the bathroom, if a hotel cannot present a guest with a clean sink and toilet on arrival they should not be in business.

Wi-fi – more and more people travel with a wish for easy connectivity these days. Whether for business or leisure, access to the internet is no longer considered a luxury. Hotels that charge for internet access may be making a few extra dollars from their guests, but they are losing more than this in goodwill. Free wi-fi in my opinion is now a basic requirement for a hotel.

Decent bed size – why do some hotels still place a small bed in a room where they can fit a proper king size? Some places in Europe still give you a single bed, at less than 1m wide. Not comfortable, and not a good impression.

Fridge – no, I don’t want it full of the hotel’s overpriced snacks and spirits. Bit I do expect a free supply of chilled drinking water. A reasonable request I think.

Free parking – I’m staying at your hotel, and you want to charge me $25 a day to park? That’s hardly a warm welcome.

Friendly staff – it might not be a dream job to work in at a hotel reception, but a smiling face and friendly greeting goes a very long way to making a hotel experience a good one. If your staff are grouchy to your guests, it will undoubtedly reflect in your guests’ perception of your company.

Things that don’t matter to me:

Over-elaborate lobbies. Make them bright, make them clean, but please, if you are going to spend more on refurbishment, start with the place that your guests will remember. Great hotel room, average lobby, not great but excuseable. Swanky lobby, dingy room; unforgiveable.

Concierge. I have never really worked out how I should make use of this service. I have stayed in many hotels where a concierge desk sits by the door, but other than asking for a map of the city I don’t think I’ve used this service. This might sound a bit thick, but what should I be asking them for?

Trouser press. One of these days I’ll use it, just to see how it works. An ironing board and iron in each room would be far more useful, instead of having to call housekeeping and wait half an hour for it to arrive.

Finally the subject of tips. Here’s a suggestion and from the discussions online I know many Europeans at least will agree : pay all staff a decent wage, build it into your costs, and then let guests know that all service charges are included in the room rate. I would immediately put such an establishment on the top of my preferred hotel list, even if it cost a little extra. Not only does it save me the discomfort of not knowing who to tip and how much, but it also marks the hotel out to me as a caring employer.

So, my wish list is this:

Include wi-fi, parking, chilled water and all service charges in the room rate, and for that rate give me a clean room and polite and friendly staff. I would willingly pay a higher room rate to stay in a hotel that satisfies this list against one where the rate is lower but tries to claw back add-on revenue at every opportunity.

I would love to hear how others agree/ disagree with my list.

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About Andy Jarosz

Owner, 501 Places. Freelance writer.
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20 Responses to Hotels – what makes a perfect stay

  1. Dave and Deb says:

    Excellent points! I agree with them all. I remember your post about tipping a few days ago, and I commented that we in Canada tip for everything. I want to say that I agree with you and most of Europe, I wish that we could just pay people a decent wage so that we don’t have to tip.

  2. I’m right there with you on your list. Cleanliness and comfy bed is key for us. I don’t need all the fancy stuff. :) And yeah.. what’s up with charging for wi-fi and parking from the hotel these days?

  3. Neil Chapman says:

    My particular bug bear is the humble showers. I’ve stayed in scores of hotels, and I can’t recall the same system if it’s not the same chain. How many variations are there for just two plumbing items – turning the water on, adjusting the temp? I’ve been near scalded, cold-showered, had a bath-shower and more than once left totally befuddled. Yet no instructions are ever left because taking a shower is so simple – yeh, right!

  4. Andy Jarosz says:

    @Dave and Deb, I don’t know if we’ll ever stamp out the tipping culture and replace it with fair employment conditions, but I wish it could be done. I have never been to Japan but I hear from others that the service industry there seems to do it right.

    @Amy whether the hotel is a 5 star place in London or a budget guesthouse in Cambodia, cleanliness is not beyond any establishment to deliver. Yet the offendors do not seem to be linked to number of stars of room rates. Maybe we need to name and shame!

    @Neil. Glad you found the site! Showers; yes, aren’t they confusing? Sometimes a dribble, sometimes a torrent where you can quickly flood the bathroom, and then sudden changes in temperature just when you think you’ve got it. I agree with you. Surely something so simple should be standard, or at least clearly explained?

    Thanks all for your comments.

  5. I can relate to your wish list! Clean rooms, comfortable beds, friendly personnel (!) and free wifi, makes me a satisfied customer at a hotel :) Including service charges would make it a lot easier…how much to give? Who to tip? It would be so much easier, if you know that the room rate you see, is everything included. No unwelcomed extra charges (wifi, tips, parking, …) at the end of your stay.
    That’s probably why a lot of travelers enjoy all-inclusive or going on an organized trip. You pay the bill, but then you have no more worries.

  6. Travelfusion says:

    These are great points – for me, it’s all about the bed. I still cannot stop talking about how amazing the beds have been on recent trips to Madrid and Warsaw.

    Another thing is a quiet room – if I request a quiet place, I expect it. I don’t want to hear parties, running in the hallway, vacuuming before 9:00am, etc if I’m on a relaxing trip. It sounds obnoxious, but it’s true!

    Kathryn @Travelfusion

  7. Andy Jarosz says:

    It seems so simple doesn’t it, Isabelle? I can’t believe that people would actually prefer it another way. But obviously they do….

    Kathryn, not obnoxious to wish for a quiet night’s sleep. I hate it when people roll their cases past my door at 6am and shout to each other without a care in the world.

    The trials of close co-habitation!

  8. I agree with all the points mentioned so far, but would like to add:

    The option to have some fresh air opposed to re circulated air-conditioned air – especially when it has picked up cooking smells!

    Some decent women’s hangers: the large wooden hanger always leave a mark on my jackets and blouses (this is when you are patient enough to wrestle with the theft proof hangers!)

  9. Elysia says:

    My hotel wish list would be…

    * FAST Wi-fi (less than $10 a day please!)

    * Clean bathroom with GOOD water pressure in the shower.

    * A room that’s quiet after 10/11pm – nothing worse than hearing what sounds like a nightclub pumping all around you as soon as it gets dark!

    * Early check in and late checkout (midday for both is perfect)

    * Cheap and/or free breakfast. Nothing annoys me more than paying $200-$300 per night for a room and then hitting the restaurant in the morning and facing a $15-$20 breakfast fee.

    * Great location, no matter how good the hotel is, if it’s in the middle of nowhere then its going to be extremely inconvenient and end up costing you so much more in transport fees.

    Those are the absolute must-haves for me :-)

    Elysia
    @ThatTravelingCouple

  10. Wi-fi, wi-fi, wi-fi! And free, free, free. This is a most excellently written post – now if we could find a way to force all hotel managers to read it and learn from it, I’d be most happy.

  11. Andy Jarosz says:

    The list of must haves is expanding! Decent hangers (Caroline) and showers (Elysia) – of course! And even men appreciate hanging their clothes in a easy convenient way that won’t leave a mark.

    Thanks Barbara too for your kind remarks. Some hotels have got it right and they get the repeat business and referrals as a result. I have attended hotel management conventions in the US and Europe and I’ve never heard a ‘normal’ guest invited to speak about their wishes and frustrations of hotel stays. I would love to speak to an audience of hoteliers and communicate some of these thoughts. Any takers?

  12. Mark H says:

    Looks a solid list to me and I agree whole-heartedly with what you say. For me it is mainly a decent-sized comfy bed, a clean room, free internet access and a decent hot shower. Most of the rest of the features I can typically live without. As an Australian I find the North American tipping in a hotel a little daunting too but that is unlikely to go away. I’ve heard many in the US argue that it is a more equitable system though I fail to see how not paying someone properly equates with that argument.

    My pet hates include the overly full fridge especially designed that if you even move one of the minibar items you get charged for it – who invented that scam. Also the internet should be free in this day and age – it would be like charging extra for hot water in the shower.

    In fancy hotels, I am also more than happy to use the same towel and sheets more than once during my stay. It is wasteful to wash them every day though hotels are wising up to this with their “green” initiatives.

  13. Andy Jarosz says:

    Thanks Mark. Looks like we have free internet as an almost universal expectation. Time for the hotel industry to wake up to this demand.
    I really liked the set up in Argentina when I was there in 2007. Even in small guests houses there was always a shared use PC that you could use and go online whenever you wished. It was free to use and relied on a fair use policy which was always followed in my limited time there.

  14. Linda Fox says:

    For me, it’s all those things (apart from the trouser press) but really it’s about expectations. You research the hotel, read the reviews, look at the pics, visit the website etc and so expectations and anticipation are huge and the experience has to match that from the second you walk in the door. So often, it doesn’t!

  15. Andy Jarosz says:

    Agree, Linda. The expectations are created by slick marketing, and even more so now by great reviews. And of course we all have a unique experience. Still no-one to defend the trouser press though. Does anyone out there use it?

  16. Charles Yap says:

    A great read… but I would like you to rethink the concierge service. Here’s how we are redefining our global concierge offering…

    (via @barbdelollis) http://content.usatoday.com/communities/hotelcheckin/post/2009/06/68493057/1

    Our full collection of Concierge videos and websites, offering guests pre-arrival access to our men (and women) in the know: http://www.intercontinentalvideo.com/

  17. Andy Jarosz says:

    Hi Charles,

    Thanks for posting and it’s great to get the views of a major hotel chain. I enjoyed watching some of the concierge videos and look forward to trying one of the table top systems. Thanks for the links.

    For me, I just don’t consider the hotel as my primary source for information. Maybe that’s just me, but I look to guide books and increasingly the internet to get my local knowledge, and then get out and get lost and experience the destination in that way. I expect the hotel to provide me with a clean, comfortable and secure place to stay. I would much rather IHG provided free wi-fi across the group and allowed me to do my own planning from the comfort of my room.

    Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to add your thoughts.

  18. Elaine Nettleton says:

    From a female traveller point of view a plug socket that has a conveniently placed mirror above it so that I can use my hair straighteners is a must. So often the plug socket and the mirror are on opposite ends of the room forcing me to heat the irons, unplug and run across the room to the mirror several times until I am done.

    And while we are on the subject of plugs, why are they always tucked away under the desk close to the foor so that I have to get down on my hands and knees to plug in my laptop? Wouldn’t it be better to have them at desk height?

  19. i would DEFINITELY agree with the free wifi access. it’s become standard, and the hotels that charge will, in the long run, lose out more, because the trend is for many to search and book accommodations with wifi friendly properties.

  20. Andy Jarosz says:

    Thanks Elaine and JR for your comments. Looks like wi-fi is a top priority (free of course). We can only help this trend shift faster by voting with our feet and not booking at places without free wi-fi. Then it will change quickly.
    Elaine, I’m with you on the strange plug positions. Why don’t they put them in easy to reach places? It’s as if they don’t want you to find them!

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