le-ekaterina: oak23: xandrachantal: leighalanna: onyx-faye: part2of3: marxnsparx: getoffmyastr
- Hotel workers have a 40% higher injury rate than other service workers.
- Women are 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men, because nearly every hotel housekeeper is a woman, and housekeepers have a 50% higher injury rate than all hotel workers.
- Hispanic housekeepers are two-thirds more likely to be injured than white housekeepers.
- 91 percent of hotel housekeepers have suffered work-related pain.
- 66 percent take pain medication just to get through their daily work.
Here’s how you can make housekeepers’ jobs a little less shitty.
- Reduce bending situations. For instance, hotels often tell you to toss towels on the floor that you want replaced. Try setting the towels on the closed toilet instead.
- Gather all the trash cans into one.
- Leave a note saying not to change the towels every day.
- Make your own beds.
- Write a note with a tip thanking the housekeeper for not making the beds.
- You can strip the beds by taking off all the sheets (including the ones holding the duvet, if that’s the system the hotel uses) and pillowcases, putting them in a pile, and then piling or loosely folding the blankets and duvet and putting them in a separate pile with the pillows on the stripped bed.
- Tip daily. The same housekeepers aren’t always there every day.
- $2-5 per person, per day is the expected gratuity if you’re a courteous guest.
- Remember to mark it clearly for them so they know it’s for them to take (as opposed to leaving bills just sitting out willy-nilly).
- Do Not Disturb: If you put up a Do Not Disturb sign, the housekeeper is usually just given another room to clean. In a lot of cases, that new room will be outside their normal section, one of the leftover rooms in another part of the hotel. This means they’ll have to push their heavy cart a little farther, spend time waiting for an elevator, and then have to clean a little faster to get it done. That other room might also be a normal, fine room, or it might be a disaster zone, where someone gutted a fish in the tub or spilled Pepsi on the bed. And if there isn’t an extra room to be given to a housekeeper when they have a DND, they’ll probably just be sent home early (especially if it’s a non-union hotel), so they lose some of that day’s pay.
- For all these reasons, try not to use the DND sign. Just tidy up your room as much as possible, follow the steps above, and leave a tip. Your room will just count as an easy clean, and maybe the housekeeper can take a couple minutes to sit in the armchair and rest instead of rushing to the next room.
THANK YOU FOR THIS.
Never remake your bed on the last day. Leave it in a nice ball on the bed for housekeeping to scoop up
my dad always taught me to make my bed in hotels and clean up to make it easier for hotel workers. they’re there to do general cleaning, like vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom for the next guest, they shouldn’t be expected to pick up your trash and other sorts of mess you’ve left behind.
Wow I wish I knew all of this before I was 21. Like I never thought to tip the cleaning staff and now I feel horrible for never doing it
Important for everyone who stays in hotels, for whatever reason.
if you don’t feel like making your own bed you can leave clothes or suitcase on the bed with all the sheets
As a housekeeper, the easiest solution to not making your bed is to just write a note saying “Please don’t make my bed” and leaving it on a clearly marked area otherwise I am forced to bring the bed back up to standard by untucking the sheets and redoing then much more tightly and such.
Setting your used towels on the toilet is confusing for a lot of us unless it’s been marked as dirty with a note, cuz a lot of guests often left swimwear or other items in these to dry them, so again this slows me down as i need to unfold each one individually to make sure im not stealing or throwing away something important.
Guests stripping the beds ALWAYS induces a huge panic in me when I go clean a room cuz it doesn’t look like a friendly gesture designed to help with the workload, it looks like someone did something incredibly messy and tried to cover it up, usually involving a biohazard like urine or blood so again, this slows me down as I need to get the biohazard safety equipment from the backroom and needing to safely go through each individual item to make sure Im not throwing away lost property, adding more time and stress to my wafer thin time allowances.
Also one thing I never see people say on these kinds of lists is to never touch windows if you can. The oils in your hands always leaves marks, and it’s a pain having to carefully search out window marks and scrubbing them out especially when the sun is shining directly through. It’s often the one thing where i need to bend and contort my body to clean and it’s never consistent.
Otherwise my main point is if youre trying to make an easy clean for a housekeeper clearly communicate what you dont want done through notes, make sure you at least gather the rubbish to be in the same area, and to clearly mark out your tips.
I was waiting for an actual housekeeper to comment on this giving actual tips instead of other people making assumptions about what makes their job easier, and I’m glad we got that
