Dirty secrets your hotel is hiding

When we go on holiday, we usually trust that our hotel room is cleaned thoroughly and that nothing untoward has gone on in the room. But could we have been wrong?

According to house keepers around the world, there are actually many secrets about your hotel room that no one tells you. It’s really shocking to find out that are weren’t on a ‘need-to-know’ basis when it comes to a room you have paid good money for. So here’s what we’ve heard from multiple sources about your hotel room and the secrets no one wanted you to know.

It’s easy to let a clean-looking room fool you — it could be the nicest hotel in the world but still, the hotel cleaners will cut corners.

1. Check your glasses

Before you drink from a fresh-looking glass, give it a rinse detergent or soap. According to Fox News, “Some hotel maids don’t even bother to use soap when cleaning drinking glasses”. Hidden cameras in a major hotel chained showed a cleaner attempting to clean a glass with cleaner that said ‘do not drink’ on the label. Most don’t even get sanitised in a dishwasher — yuk.

2. Bedspreads

Your bed might look inviting and clean, but according to AOL’s research, the bedspread and sheets are rarely cleaned. This is shocking because we all know what honeymooning couples do on their marital bed! Plenty of us would have been caught out nuzzling into a fresh-looking pillow or pulling the blanket right up to our faces, but chances are, someone else before you did the same thing. There are also a myriad of bed bugs and even if you’re in a four or five star hotel, they won’t discriminate.

3. The most obvious places are not the cleanest

You’d think that a cleaner would give benches a wipe down or clean the toilet but more often than now, they don’t. Germs are everywhere in a hotel room and so it’s handy to carry some disinfectant wipes to wipe down anything that looks dirty or used. Housekeepers usually only have 15-20 minutes to clean a room so they can’t go to a huge amount of effort.

4. If it looks clean and unused, then it will stay

According to a Reddit user, if the bedspread, towels and sheets look clean and aren’t wrinkled, then they stay. Cleaners think of this as a gold mine as they don’t have to remake a bed, only fix it up.

5. Towels aren’t cleaned either

Yep, those towels that you wipe all over your body may actually have been used by someone else. This is hard with white towels but some people will only wipe their hands on it after washing.

6. Remote controls

Like at home, remote controls can be a goldmine for germs. We rarely think to clean them ourselves so consider how many people would have touched them at your hotel. Pop it in a plastic bag instead and use that way.

7. Telephones

This is a bit of an obvious one but telephones have germs and housekeeping are unlikely to bother giving them a once over.

So how should you make sure you get the cleanest hotel room possible?

• Check the hotel’s ratings on TripAdvisor and see what other guests say about the cleanliness
• Bring your own water or buy there
• Bring a small blanket of your own
• Take disinfectant wipes with you and give the room a once over
• Wash all glasses, mugs and cutlery yourself
• Remove the bedspreads and top sheet and take throw/decorate pillows off the bed

What’s the dirtiest hotel room you’ve ever stayed in? What did you do about it? Let us know in the comments section below.