With up to 17 rooms to clean each shift, Fatima Amahmoud’s job at the Moxy hotel in downtown Boston sometimes feels impossible.
There was the time she found three days worth of blond dog fur clinging to the curtains, the bedspread and the carpet. She knew she wouldn’t finish in the 30 minutes she is supposed to spend on each room. The dog owner had declined daily room cleaning, an option that many hotels have encouraged as environmentally friendly but is a way for them to cut labor costs and cope with worker shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unionized housekeepers, however, have waged a fierce fight to restore automatic daily room cleaning at major hotel chains, saying they have been saddled with unmanageable workloads, or in many cases, fewer hours and a decline in income.
The dispute has become emblematic of the frustration over working conditions among hotel workers, who were put out of their jobs for months during pandemic shutdowns and returned to an industry grappling with chronic staffing shortages and evolving travel trends.
Good luck to them. It’s a thankless job. We tip the front of house when all they do is hand you your take-out, but not the workers that clean the skid marks you left in the toilet, or the hair dye in the tub, or the beer someone spilled in the carpet. They’re the ones that should be getting tipped.
They’re understaffed for the same reasons as any in the service industry - shitty work and especially low pay.
You can and absolutely should leave a tip for the cleaners whenever it’s getting done. Just leave a note that says, “thank you, here’s a tip.” With the cash next to it.
That sounds exactly like an MBA thought. If rooms don’t get cleaned daily I don’t need as many housekeepers. Ignore the fact that they take longer to clean when it is time and that in 6 months rooms will be rolling over for cleaning at around the same rate as before, requiring more housekeepers, not less. MBA got a bonus for saving the business money though…
Bad prediction: hotels start charging cleaning fees a la Airbnb.
I just paid a $250 cleaning fee at a hotel this past week. It was a dog friendly room and I had 2 dogs and stayed for 5 nights. The problem is that I paid a non-refundable $200 pet fee and a $250 cleaning fee, on top of being required to strip the beds and take the trash out to the dumpster myself on top of it.
I could have spent an hour removing dog hair from couches and sweeping it all up but with $450 in cleaning fees alone it’s difficult as a consumer to reconcile doing extra work. Problem is, who does that $450 go to? Somehow I feel like the housekeepers don’t see much of it.
They already do when you leave a mess or destroy property. That’s not unusual and acts as a deterrent
I think they mean for the standard daily cleaning we used to get included. God forbid they dip into record profits. They’ll pass the extra labor cost onto the consumer
Well if you dip into the record profits, what even was the point in the first place?
/s
The “no daily room cleaning” thing is and always has been bullshit. They used COVID as an excuse for it. It was a way to cut cost and provide less value to the customer.
I usually hang the do not disturb sign most of the week just because I don’t like having random people around my shit. But after reading this I’m reconsidering how I work hotel stays.
If that’s your preference that’s fine. The ridiculous part was them stopping it as a default. It resulted in scenarios like people paying $800 per night to stay in a Disney hotel and having an undersized room that doesn’t even get cleaned during the week they are there.
I’ve been watching everything get cut in the quest for endless growth all my life. When I was a kid, my mom went to the bank and they had a bunch of tellers. Now, at the branch I use, they have a dozen spots at the counter and never more than two tellers. Everything keeps getting shittier as capitalism consumes itself.
I’m pretty pro worker, but this sounds like forcing daily cleaning on customers who don’t want it. That just seems the wrong way to go. Increased time to do their jobs, minimum pay no matter the hours needed, and better hourly rates is where I would have gone.
Yeah, I usually ask for no cleaning because I thought it’d save them time and effort…? It’s not like I make the room that much dirtier with an extra day. Instead they have to spend time making my bed and stuff for no reason. Or have I been doing it wrong this entire time?
The point is that the choice should be left with the customer and not the hotel.
Which point? It doesn’t seem like that is what the union is pushing for. I mean sure, they probably aren’t asking the hotel to forcibly clean customers rooms, but even doing it by default seems like the wrong direction. It should be on request. And the employees pay shouldn’t depend on the customers whims. It should be stable pay that they are asking for with the possibility of overtime.
This had nothing to do with what the union wants, the previous poster was asking if they have been doing it wrong
It’s their choice so there is no right or wrong
I agree. I don’t want strangers in my room. Ever. The do not disturb goes on as soon as I enter and doesn’t come off. That being said, I’m usually like 3 nights max and try to leave the room in good shape.
There are hotels that allow dogs in the rooms? I don’t see how that could work in the long run without requiring deposits that most people wouldn’t want to pay.
There is always pet fee for about $100 and I thought it’s for the extra cleaning. If the customer declined daily house keeping and kept the dog for a week in the room then they should be charged accordingly and not make the housekeepers clean it in the same amount of time as the other rooms.
People wanting or needing to travel with their dog just pay the extra fees and deposits.
Usually a pet fee of $25 to $50.
The replies make sense, and I should have realized. I guess I was thinking any deposit large enough to cover all the possibilities would be more than anyone would agree to, but I can see how it’s to both owner and guest’s advantage to make it work.
Rooms without carpeting, and non-refundable pet fees. Vinyl flooring makes cleaning up after pets trivial. The only issue you have is soiling of upholstery and potential chewing. But if everyone pays a $100 per dog fee, only a subset of those dog owners will cause any issues so the good dogs subsidize the cost for the bad dogs.
The fee and deposits sound steep, until you compare them with the astronomical costs of dog boarding.
I have yet to see a pet friendly hotel with vinyl floors. It’s always been wall to wall carpeting.
Personally I am all in favor of hard floors dogs or not. I stayed In hotel recently that mops the floors after every stay and that seems preferable to carpet and a vacuum.
But oddly enough, it was not pet friendly. The last two i stayed in with carpet were though.
Huh, I’ve never seen a carpeted pet friendly room, for obvious reasons.
Hotel housekeepers work their asses off. It is a HARD job. I wish them all the luck in the world in their unionizing efforts!
Personally, no mandatory daily cleanings. But, just like if you smoke, if you basically trash the room, then you should be required to pay higher fees when it takes longer than the minimum to clean up a room. Lots of dog hair, human fluids everywhere, major spills, garbage everywhere, etc. That way you have to pay the overtime for all the time it takes to clean up a trashed room. Take a video of your room before you check out, and if they say it took longer, then dispute it with the video.
