Speaking of hotels, which we were just doing over here, this is totally gross: a news investigation shows that a full third of hotels don’t wash the sheets between guests. Granted the sample was small – nine hotels were put to the test – but still. Ew. Quite frankly, a hotel that fails to enforce simple hygiene standards suggests other deficiencies in other areas. If they are not capable of changing bed sheets, it becomes a struggle to imagine they are being successful elsewhere.
Inside Edition sent an investigative team to the nine hotel rooms. Each time they sprayed “a harmless, washable, fluorescent paint onto the bedsheet using a stencil that says, ‘I SLEPT HERE.’” The paint is visible only with blacklight – kind of like lint on a cool, dark outfit.
They checked out, leaving the beds unmade – indicating that they had been slept in – then checked back in the next day under different names (which seems weird since you usually need ID to check into hotels but I’ll allow it).
The paint was still there in THREE OUT OF THE NINE ROOMS! EWWWWWWW.
“At the Candlewood Inn & Suites near Manhattan’s Times Square, we sprayed down our mark. And incredibly, when we returned the next day under a different reservation “I SLEPT HERE” was still on the sheets!”
A reporter asked the manager about it and the manager said, “Okay, I expect them to be changed every day and that is a policy of our property.” A spokesperson for the Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG), which owns Candlewood & Suites, said they “take great pride in setting stringent quality standards, which we take very seriously.
“Any claim that a hotel is not following the standards falls below our expectations. This incident serves as a reminder to all hotels to enforce this important standard.”
The same thing happened at a La Quinta, where a maid claimed to have changed the sheets until she was kinda faced with irrefutable evidence that she was lying.
In a statement to Inside Edition, La Quinta Inns & Suites said: “We strive to provide a positive, consistent guest experience at all of our branded hotels. This includes providing a clean guestroom for every guest. We have reached out to the management team at this franchised location to understand what happened and have addressed the issue.”
The third yucky place was a Residence Inn by Marriott, also near Times Square. The manager, seen in the video below, is really unhappy and defensive about getting caught off guard in her hotel’s web of filthy yucky lies, and seems to be trying to play it off like it’s the reporters who are jerks. But, in fairness, she’s not the one who didn’t change the sheets and she probably just has no clue what to say.
Marriott hotels said in a statement:
“We were concerned to hear of the comments about the cleanliness of one of our guest rooms, as we pride ourselves on the high standards of cleanliness throughout the hotel.
“We apologized to the guest who brought this to our attention and take these comments very seriously. We are inspecting the room thoroughly to insure this does not recur.”
I feel like maybe I didn’t need to know this. I mean, I stay in a fair number of hotels and there is literally no way to know if your sheets have been changed. So, since I already tend to overpack and don’t want to start brining my own sheets, I think I’d have been happier running with the assumption that all hotels always change the sheets, y’know?
What about you? Are you glad you have this information or would you have preferred blissful ignorance? Because now that we know this, what do we do?
Here’s video!