[Bullfrog]

I’d suggest hotel owners / managers actually arrange for themselves or staff to sleep & use the bedroom & bathroom facilities. That way they would understand why guests get frustrated.

I recently stayed at the reasonably new Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.

A beautifully designed ‘eco / green’ hotel.

I was so tired the first night that I had not noticed that my Executive room was by the elevator. By midnight, all I could hear was the noise of the lifts. So yes, the next morning I moved rooms.

This hotel puts its Executive rooms on the top floors and the Executive lounge near the ground floor .. ‘how stupid’.

My next room was well away from the lifts. However the hotel is made of a significant amount of glass with a heating system based on air ventilation. So in early January I had the choice of keeping the room warm & noisy, or quiet & freezing cold.

Another ‘green’ idea was the very reduced water pressure in the bathrooms. So yes, maintenance came and removed the filters that are built into the taps to give me a pressure of water with which I could wash.

One evening, at about 10pm my room key would not work. Security came to my room whilst I waited outside to verify my identity & to use their master key. The door unit had failed, and I had to wait 40 minutes for maintenance to change the entry system on my door.

‘Designers need to realise that functionality is vital’.

[Cedric_Statherby]

Just a small tip to all on the “keycard in light slot” issue. 9 times out of 10 a business card will do the trick …

Bullfrog – you are so right on the problem of hotel designers never actually sleeping in their nightmare rooms. My worst ever experience was a room where the lights were “movement sensitive” – useful I suppose if you need to go to the bathroom in the night, but rather OTT if merely rolling over in bed sets off the full room lighting, as was the case for me in an ever-so-trendy hotel in Singapore recently. A call to reception, and then maintenance, could not fix things, so in the end I simply unscrewed the light bulbs. Not, I suspect, what the room designer intended!

[stevescoots]

Just a small tip to all on the “keycard in light slot” issue. 9 times out of 10 a business card will do the trick …

or a redundant FF card 🙂

[DavidRenton]

I’ve had credit cards, proximity cards, and hotel keys all wiped by my Blackberry :(. I keep a few spare keycards with me and I’ve made a mark with a Sharpie so I know they are not live cards. I did stay in a hotel in the UK last year which used a proximity door access, and the electric box would only take a valid proximity key to operate! One tip is not to leave it in the box when you leave for the day as the housekeeper will get annoyed…..

My main room gripes are: all the electric switches that have a specific order needed to operate the lighting, and aircon that is centrally controlled and can’t be turned off.

Bullfrog – maybe the hotel wanted to keep the good views for the exec rooms and not for the lounge? I would rather have a good view to wake up to and drop a few floors for a club lounge.

[jonathanmiller]

Judy – most hotel employees are probably loved by their mothers, if not by other people (including me – rare indeed is the visit to an hotel where I don’t feel like strangling one at some point). But it’s their employers who are most at fault: (a) they train them to follows procedure – including in oral response – and penalize the application of brain and discretion; and (b) if you pay peanuts, you get ……. Sad, innit? Jonathan

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