9 common hotel complaints, from check-in and checkout times to Wi-fi problems to air con, heating and shower controls
- Ben West has spent the past two years staying in hotels around the world, and he shares his most common and irritating complaints
- These include check-in getting later and checkout earlier, hotel safes that are too small or don’t work and cleaners not heeding ‘Do not disturb’ signs
For work, I have been staying in hotels around the world, at a variety of price points, almost continuously for more than two years, and I’ve been surprised at how many of my personal bugbears are commonplace.
These are some of the most irritating:
1 Ignoring the ‘Do not disturb’ sign
This is usually the doing of impatient cleaners in hotels that haven’t devised a useful system whereby they are informed by reception when rooms have been vacated.
Cleaners assume the guest has checked out without having removed the “Do not disturb” sign. Yet, if you have paid a small fortune for a hotel room, the least you can expect is privacy.
And intrusions don’t always happen on the day of checkout.
I was recently lounging on a sunbed on my expensive hotel room’s veranda, listening to music with headphones, when a cleaner tapped my shoulder, asking whether I wanted the room attended to. This was despite the “Do not disturb” sign being displayed.
2 Check-in and checkout times
There was a time when check-in was typically around 2pm and checkout at noon. The window between the two has grown larger and larger, and now it is common to be told to leave as early as 10am (as I found at the Generator Rome hotel, for example) and not to arrive until 4pm (Loews Regency New York).