- When he pressed the plush in-room bathrobes into emergency service.
We’ve Used Showers for Centuries. Why Can’t Hotels Make Them Easier?
Guests just want to get clean without wet floors and confusing temperature controls
Alan Benjamin was staying at a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., in early October when he pressed the plush in-room bathrobes into emergency service.
The doorless shower in his room was flooding, water spilling onto the slate tile floor.
“I literally wound up taking two robes and making a dam so that water would not run out of the shower,” says Benjamin, chief executive of a company that purchases furniture, fixtures and equipment for hotels.
Hotel showers are a perennial annoyance for frequent travelers. The specific gripes evolve with the trends in hotel bathrooms. Today’s complaints center on fancy walk-in showers that aren’t functional, temperature controls that call for an instruction manual and confusing dispensers that require reading glasses in the shower so you don’t wash your hair with body wash.
“People who design hotel showers have never actually taken a shower,” one traveler posted in a
forum on Reddit earlier this year to a chorus of thumbs-up.Half a shower
On the list of pressing world issues, hotel showers with half a door, rather than one that closes, don’t rank high. Yet the subject keeps coming up. Travelers feel understandably picky given the prices they often pay for rooms.
Comedian Nate Bargatze poked fun at them in his “Saturday Night Live” monologue last week. Bargatze joked that he’s befuddled by how the world “is so future now.” Instead of enclosed showers, he said, hotels now have those “half-a-glass” showers.
“That’s the future. That’s what they want,” he said. “In the future, the floors are always wet.”
One traveler’s tactic, according to the Reddit thread, is a standing request for extra towels: “When I check in to a hotel and they have the half door, I call housekeeping and request eight additional towels.”
Jill Canfield, a trade-association attorney who lives in Virginia, says she hates having to clamber into such showers to turn the water on. You never know whether you’re going to get scalded or blasted with cold water.
“There’s no opportunity to warm the water or test the water,” she says. “You kind of turn it on and jump out as fast as you can.” And forget trying to keep your hair dry during a quick body rinse.
While it annoys her, Canfield accepts it as a part of life on the road: “In the end, it’s just a shower.”
Christian Super, a retired IT executive who lives in New Orleans, has platinum status with Marriott and prefers the half-glass showers to curtained ones, but has little else nice to say about them.
“The design is ridiculous,” he says. “I don’t know who thought of this.”
Marriott declined to comment on its showers.
Benjamin, the D.C. guest who uses robes as mops, says hotels have been switching up their showers to give them a more sleek, spalike feel, erasing the shower curtain ick of old. The newer design also makes them easier to clean. Half a shower door takes half the time.
Benjamin, who lives in Boulder, Colo., says the wet bathroom floors at his hotel were a hot topic at the conference he attended. He says shower changes often aren’t tested to the degree of other changes to the room.
“Unless you’re staying [overnight] in the model room, you’re not showering. You’re not flushing the toilet,” he says.
Which is which?
No less nettlesome for some travelers: the small print on those big bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body wash hotels have installed in showers in recent years to replace mini bottles.
A post on the hard-to-read labels in a Marriott Bonvoy
group last summer generated nearly 200 comments. One of my favorites: “Had those [bottles] at a Courtyard last week. Had to get out of the shower to figure out which was which. And while we’re at it, quit putting them on the side wall. Put them on the front or back. I need my elbow room.”
Hotel guests’ gripes do get results. Think about how rarely you encounter body hugging shower curtains today. Two decades ago, in a survey by Westin Hotels & Resorts, 20% of travelers cited “the shower curtain sucking in and touching you” as a top peeve. Low water pressure was another. The chain responded by introducing new shower heads and curved curtain rods that year, calling it the Westin Heavenly Bath, a follow-up to its trendsetting Heavenly Bed.
Don’t get British author Frances Quinn started on hotel showers. Quinn lives in Brighton, England, and travels to promote her historical fiction books.
A few weeks ago at a “very nice hotel” in Ipswich, the shower came with laminated instructions.
“It’s a tap, for God’s sake, not a nuclear reactor,” she says.
Quinn says she quickly studied the instructions, then jumped in the shower before she forgot them, because they were only printed on the side facing away from the shower.
In the end, she gave up.
“I just took a bath,” she says.
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