Dear Hotel Owners, The Airbnb is Winning and You Did This to Yourself

I have spent more time in hotel rooms over the last year than I ever intended to. Medical trips, mostly the sort of trips where you’re already not at your best and the last thing you need is to lie awake at 2 a.m. in a room that smells like a wet dog made a series of poor decisions.

I have become, through no fault of my own, something of an involuntary hotel critic. A connoisseur of institutional misery. A man who can now assess the structural failures of a continental breakfast from across a lobby.

I have stayed at several chains over the course of this year, and I have become most intimately acquainted with one in particular, and while I don’t want to name names, this is an establishment whose family name you would recognize, whose heiress once spent a season on reality television learning what it felt like to be the rest of us, and whose properties have apparently decided that the lessons of that experience did not need to trickle down to the guest experience.

I am not here to name names. I am here to have a conversation.

A frank one.

A heart-to-heart conversation you would have with someone who is about to lose your business permanently and doesn’t seem to know it yet.

First, let me explain something I have learned through painful, firsthand research: the quality of a hotel stay is in direct and precise proportion to the number of people sharing the room. This is not an opinion. This is physics.

One person in a room? Manageable. Sure, the temperature never quite gets right — it’s either the surface of the sun or a meat locker, with nothing in between — and the bathroom has seen better days, and there’s a mysterious smell you’ve decided not to investigate. But you’re one person. You adapt. You survive. You check out and you don’t write a column about it.

Two people? You’re running into each other. The bathroom becomes a scheduling negotiation. The bed, which seemed adequate in the photos, turns out to be approximately the size of a large cracker. But you manage. You’re adults. You’ve been through worse.

Adults with any number of children? That is misery with a continental breakfast. That is four people in a room designed for one and a half, with one working outlet, a television remote that requires a PhD to operate, and a bathroom that is about to become the subject of its own section of this letter.

But first, Let’s talk about housekeeping.

During the pandemic, hotels slashed their housekeeping services to the bone. Understandable at the time. Necessary, even. But here is what happened next, and I want you to follow this carefully because it is the part where the greed comes in: when the pandemic ended and the guests came back and the profits returned, the staffing did not. The corporate overlords looked at the numbers, saw that they were saving a fortune running skeleton crews, and decided that this was simply the new normal. The guests would adjust.

The guests have not adjusted.

Picture this. Four people in a room. Four people who shower. Two people who drink coffee in the morning. Four sets of towels. Two sad little packets of coffee. And housekeeping every other day, if you’re lucky, if the stars align, if the one overworked housekeeper assigned to your entire floor hasn’t already been run into the ground by the twelve rooms ahead of yours.

Some of us need a shower every morning. I understand that Paul Pothead, the night desk clerk who smells like a Phish concert and a bag of Doritos, may operate on a different schedule. That is between him and his maker. But a significant portion of your paying guests require both coffee and hygiene on a daily basis, and your current staffing model treats that as an unreasonable demand.

I was at one hotel recently — recently, as in this year, as in a place that is currently open and taking reservations — where I asked for extra towels and was told, with a straight face, that every towel in the building was being washed. Every towel. In a hotel. That was open. With guests in it. This is either catastrophically poor planning or your corporate office is sending you the bare minimum of everything and calling it a budget. Either way, someone needs to be embarrassed about it, and it should not be me, standing in a hallway in a robe, asking for a towel like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge.

The only genuine advantage hotels have over short-term rentals — the one thing Airbnb cannot offer you — is housekeeping. Someone comes in, makes the bed, replaces the towels, restores order to the chaos. That is the value proposition. That is why people pay hotel prices instead of renting someone’s spare bedroom. And you have taken that advantage, that one remaining leg up, and amputated it because it makes your second quarter numbers look better to those all-important shareholders.

But the shortages don’t end at housekeeping.

Hotels used to have people. Multiple people. A staff. A team. Human beings stationed at various points throughout the building whose job was to assist guests. Now there is one person at the desk, and that person is doing the job of four, and they are doing it with the haunted expression of someone who has seen things they cannot unsee.

I have stood at a hotel front desk and watched the single employee answer the phone, check in a new guest, respond to a complaint from the hallway, and attempt to locate a towel — all simultaneously — while a line formed behind me that stretched back to the parking lot.

We have collectively agreed, as a society, to pretend the pandemic never happened. Fine. I’ll play along. But you do not get to have it both ways, Mr. Hotelier. You do not get to charge 2026 prices and run 2020 staffing levels. You do not get to rake in obscene profits and then tell me there’s nobody available to fix my air conditioning because it’s just the one guy and he’s currently dealing with a situation on the third floor. You have to spend money to run a hotel. That is, I’m told, how businesses work.

Now, that you’ve stuck with me this long, let’s get down and dirty. I would like to take a moment to discuss bathroom exhaust fans, or more precisely, the hotel industry’s apparent decision to eliminate them from existence. In addition to the lack of a bathroom fan being an obscene and humiliating decision for your guests because human beings do have bodily functions to tend to, there are some basic phyiscs issues to consider.

When you run a shower in a bathroom without an exhaust fan, the steam has nowhere to go. This is not a design preference. This is science. The steam exits the bathroom and enters the room, where it raises the humidity, makes everything feel damp, and creates an atmosphere that is less “hotel room” and more “greenhouse in August.” Your guests are not plants. They do not thrive in these conditions. They lie on top of the covers at midnight, staring at the ceiling, wondering why everything feels slightly wet, and they are correct to wonder, because everything is slightly wet, because you removed the exhaust fan to save a few dollars during construction and now the entire room is a terrarium.

You either did this to save money, or you like to replace carpet and paint on the walls five years sooner, or you enjoy going on vacations with your family and having to smell everyone’s waste because you’re a sick freak who likes to prepare for your inevitable prison sentence when you finally and gloriously get caught for all of your unethical and illegal ways.

Now. The rooms themselves.

If a guest comes to the front desk and tells you that their room has bugs, a broken air conditioning unit, three broken faucets, a toilet that flushes with the enthusiasm of a sloth competing in a road race, and a smell that suggests the ventilation situation has been a problem for some time — the correct response is to fix the room. Not just move the guest. Fix the room.

I was moved from such a room on a recent stay, which I appreciated. I genuinely did. But I watched that room get booked again the next morning, and somewhere out there is a family who checked into it without knowing what they were walking into.

And now we arrive at the mattress covers.

I don’t know how to say this gently, so I’m going to say it directly: wash them.

The hotel I am sitting in as I write this has a brown stain on the mattress cover directly where my head goes. I have positioned myself accordingly. I am not happy about it.

Last summer, we took a family road trip — the children were older, I thought we’d give hotels another try, I was optimistic in the way that only a man who has forgotten his previous hotel experiences can be optimistic — and at one stop, the mattress cover had red stains across it. Not a small stain. Stains, plural, in a pattern that suggested either a crime scene or a very bad night, and I was not interested in determining which. The room was so thoroughly unacceptable that we left the next morning.

When we attempted to get our money back, the hotel accused us of deliberately staining the mattress cover with fruit punch and banned us from the property.

Fruit punch.

They looked at whatever was on that mattress cover — whatever had been on that mattress cover, apparently, for some time before our arrival — and decided that we had done it. With fruit punch. Deliberately. As a scheme. And then placed a clean sheet over it. To get out of paying for a hotel room that had cost us less than a nice dinner.

I want to be clear: I have never in my life committed mattress cover fraud. I do not have the energy for it. I am a tired man with children and a column to write.

I also want to note that this particular property had the Ten Commandments displayed prominently in their courtyard. I am not a theologian, but I believe at least one of those commandments has something to say about bearing false witness. If you’re going to accuse your guests of fruit punch sabotage while your mattress covers look like a prop from a true crime documentary, perhaps retire the scripture garden until you’ve gotten your house in order. Literally.

I thought, when my children got older, that hotels might be worth trying again. I thought we’d turned a corner. I was wrong, and I have the stained mattress cover and the phantom towel situation to prove it.

Next time, I’m booking the Airbnb.

It won’t have housekeeping, but at least I won’t have to beg, steal, and borrow for towels and toilet paper.