Top Travel Tips from Hotel Guests to Owners

These Travel Tips Can Pay Off Big

Every hotel aspires to good reviews, positive reviews, and repeat business. Not every hotel gets them, even though in many cases the cause of a guest’s dissatisfaction is eminently preventable. Here, then, is a selection of the best travel tips from hotel patrons addressed to establishments in which they stayed. Heeding this feedback could go a long way toward shifting a departing guest’s attitude from “Disappointing” or “Meh” to “From now on, I’m staying here whenever I’m in town.”

Travel Tips: The Bathroom

There are several things the hotel can do to make the bathroom in a guest’s room easier and pleasanter to use.

• Counter space. The counter should hold at least two toiletry bags, or there should be a shelf in the bathroom. There should also be a rack or shelf in the shower to accommodate a razor and the guest’s soap or hair products, if they were brought from home.
• Single-use plastics. If you’re environmentally minded, you may wince at the sight of those little plastic bottles. For those who feel that way, wall-mounted dispensers of shampoo, conditioner, and bath gel in the shower are a better way to go.
• Many guests wash out items in the hope they will dry overnight, hanging them on doorknobs or showerheads because there’s no better alternative. Hotels can provide a better alternative in the form of a retractable clothesline.
• It’s nice if you have a place to hang things in the bathroom other than over the shower curtain rod. It’s especially nice now that so many hotels are suggesting that guests use towels over the course of multiple days. Putting up some hooks would make this option more pleasant and convenient.

Elsewhere in the Room

• The TV. Guests need a list of all the TV channels. It would also be nice if the television was set to switch on to the same channel it was on the last time it was switched off. Guests often want to return to that same channel and dislike having to search around to find it again.
• The safe. These days, money isn’t the only value you might want the safe to protect. It should be big enough to hold a tablet or laptop. It should also be positioned in such a way that you don’t have to sit on the floor to access it.
• Luggage racks. Though hotel rooms intended for dual occupancy do a fair job of providing for it in most respects, they seldom offer more than one luggage rack. There should be two to avoid the necessity of improvising a second one out of a chair or the cabinet that the TV or coffee maker sits on.

Room Assignment

It’s possible to check in to a hotel with a lovely view and find out that view is not for you, or at least, not for your room. The window in your room looks out on a roof with air ducts or something equally unappealing.

If you had no reservation and are taking what you can get, this is reasonable enough. But if you had a longstanding reservation, it amounts to shoddy customer service. When there’s a reservation, hotels don’t need to wait to make room assignments until the guest checks in. They could do it in advance and pair the guest with the best room in his or her price category.