This week Latest Sale reports on a worrying trend from the Hospitality, Travel and Leisure Business Directory; luxury hotels that seem to have ceased their traditional housekeeping service. Whether this is due to a change in management or the time housekeeping staff dedicate to each guest room, it has become clear that housekeeping is no longer housekeeping and not necessarily a standard service offered by even some of the most well known hotel chains. The following housekeeping services seem to have fallen off the radar;
- Clothes and other garments that are unfolded and left on the bed will remain unfolded when guests return to their room.
- Soiled glasses in guest rooms will not necessarily be cleared and replaced. Expect the attention to detail score in this area to be 50% which is simply unacceptable for a 4* and 5* hotel.
- Any items such as clothing left on chairs will remain there and will no longer be folded by the housekeeping staff and neither will they be hung in closets or folded and placed in drawers.
- Guest rooms will not necessarily be vacuumed every day unless requested. This remains the case even after a guest has been blow drying their hair. Housekeeping will simply ignore this factor and guests may be disappointed when they return to their room after a long day to see the same pieces of hair from the morning still on the carpet.
Such drastic changes to the 5* hotel housekeeping service have been exercised across many a hotel chain. This unhealthy trend that reduces the guest’s enjoyment of the hotel as a whole and in effect lays the responsibility on the guest to carry out the core housekeeping service in part, has begun to transcend hotels in global cities with London seeming to be one of the most hardest hit. Some well known global hotel chains are requesting so-called resort fees (even when these hotels are not even located in a resort as such) or what they describe as maintenance fees that apply in order that rooms be cleaned to a high standard. We will await to see how and when London and other global cities will eventually distance themselves from this disappointing trend.