I'm only going to say this once but… EWWWWWW!
A new report has just come out to let us know that hotel rooms aren't actually as clean as we'd like to think. I've heard before that bed linens can be pretty gross in certain places but, since there are no industry standards on what should be cleaned and how, hotel rooms are pretty heavily contaminated with bacteria.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, though, since my parents just spent an awful weekend when they discovered bed bugs in their hotel. I mean, HOW DISGUSTING IS THAT?! I'm itching just thinking about it all! Between the bacteria and the bugs, I am seriously afraid to ever rent a hotel room again.
Readmore ¿Qué más? Did you know tons of homeless kids live on the highway to Disney World?
My parent's horrible experience at the Mt. Dora Quality Inn & Suites aside (and by "horrible" I mean that the manager was rude to them, moved them rooms but only offered them a $25 discount after they found and killed at least a dozen bed bugs—and also saw a heavily contaminated mattress), hotels everywhere aren't doing too well. Katie Kirsch, an undergraduate student at the University of Houston who presented the study, explains:
Hoteliers have an obligation to provide their guests with a safe and secure environment. Currently, housekeeping practices vary across brands and properties with little or no standardization industry wide. The current validation method for hotel room cleanliness is a visual assessment, which has been shown to be ineffective in measuring levels of sanitation. Currently, housekeepers clean 14-16 rooms per 8-hour shift, spending approximately 30 minutes on each room. Identifying high-risk items within a hotel room would allow housekeeping managers to strategically design cleaning practices and allocate time to efficiently reduce the potential health risks posed by microbial contamination in hotel rooms.
Want to find other moms como tú? "Like" MamásLatinas on Facebook!
Apparently the biggest area of concern is the television remote, which shouldn't really be a surprise considering that absolutely EVERYONE touches it and the housekeepers probably never think to clean it since it doesn't really look dirty. I hope that, at the very least, hotel owners will learn to implement some good rules about efficient cleaning. Actually, wouldn't it be nice if the American Hotel & Lodging Association had some sort of guide about cleaning? I definitely don't know if I want to be stepping into a hotel room considering all that may be lurking there.
What do you think about these findings? Do you stay in hotels and wonder how clean the room is? Share with us in the comments below!
Image via Thinkstock
