There’s a lot to love about hotels - the luxury, the service, and, of course, the giant,
comfy beds with those fresh, white linens.
If you’ve spent any time at all staying in hotels, though, you’ve probably also
encountered a few things that confuse and even frustrate you.
For example, why are hotel bed sheets always tucked so dang tight!
Imagine this: you’ve just landed in a strange city after a long, hellish flight.
You’ve endured hours of delays, jet lag, bad weather and terrifying turbulence to get
here; you’ve fought your way through the mad arrivals crowd and fought to get a cab,
and then tolerated an overly chatty cab driver and bumper-to-bumper traffic to finally make
it to your hotel...only to find out that the hotel has no record of your reservation!
What a day!
Thankfully, your luck is finally starting to turn.
The hotel has one room left for you - and it’s a suite!
You’re too tired to care about the extra cost at the moment - all you want to do is
crawl into that big, comfy hotel bed and sleep for days.
You let yourself into your room and hardly even notice the luxurious surroundings as
you make a beeline for that giant, plush bed, shedding your clothes as you go.
You quickly untuck the sheets at the nearest corner and crawl into the soft sheets, ready
to slip into oblivion.
But you quickly realize that sleep is still out of reach - you just can’t seem to get
comfortable.
You would be tossing and turning if you could - but the hotel sheets are tucked so tight
that you can’t move an inch!
Exhausted and frustrated, you fight your way out of the sheet trap and frantically rip
all of the sheets off the bed.
Finally free, you calm down, climb back into bed and pull the blankets over yourself.
As you finally drift off to sleep, though, you can’t help but wonder: Why, oh WHY,
are hotel bed sheets always tucked so dang tight!?
While it may feel like they are playing a prank on you, hotels aren’t intentionally
short-sheeting you.
There is a method to their madness when it comes to tucking the sheets so dang tight.
Here’s something you might not know about hotels: they actually don’t use fitted sheets!
That’s right, all hotel sheets are standard, flat sheets, including the bottom one covering
the mattress.
Anyone who has ever had to wash their own sheets knows how frustrating it can be to
wrangle and fold fitted sheets.
Hotels go through hundreds of sheets a day, which means efficiency matters.
Hotels use automated washing and folding machines to help process their huge volumes of laundry,
and these folding machines can only process flat sheets.
Using flat sheets also means that hotels only need to stock one size of sheet to fit all
of their beds, no matter the size.
When making up the beds, housekeepers use a technique called “Hospital Corners”
to ensure a tight fit and neat look on the bed.
If you’ve never been in the army, to summer camp, or worked in a hospital, you probably
have no idea what “Hospital Corners” are.
Imagine using a series of overlapping folds to create neat, tight corners with the sheets,
kind of like gift wrapping your mattress.
OK, so that explains why the bottom sheet needs to be tucked so tightly, but why can’t
the top sheets be left untucked?
The answer might surprise you.
Of course, tucking in the top sheets and quilts protects the edges from dragging on the ground
and getting dirty or worn.
But the main reason for tucking in the top layers is actually hygienic - tightly tucked
sheets help protect against bed bugs, the greatest foe of hotels everywhere.
In some parts of the world, bed bugs are the least of your problems - tightly tucked sheets
just might be the thing that prevents you from sharing your bed with dangerous critters
like spiders, scorpions and snakes!
But the most important reason why hotels tuck the sheets so tight has nothing to do with
efficiency or even hygiene - it’s all about appearances.
It’s actually become the standard across the hotel industry to make the bed with the
sheets tightly tucked on all sides and the bedding folded down at the top so that guests
can quickly see that the sheets are clean and know that bed was professionally made
just for them.
A neatly made bed clearly sends a message that no one else has touched anything that’s
about to touch you.
Plus, with sheets so tight, you know no one else could have possibly slept in in your
bed!
On that note, why do hotels use white linens in the first place?
You would think that white would be the last colour you’d pick for sheets and towels
that will see so much use.
Again, it’s about both efficiency and appearances.
Psychologically, our minds automatically associate white with clean, and hotels leverage this
mental trick by using bright white sheets to signal to us that the room is clean, fresh,
and made up just for us.
White sheets are actually easier to wash, too, since the entire load can be bleached
to disinfect and remove any stains.
Hotels also typically use a laundry product with a whitening agent that actually deposits
into the fabric and reflects light, making the white linens look even brighter.
However, you might want to skip the comforter altogether during your next hotel stay.
Because the sheets are meant to prevent your body from coming into contact with the comforter,
and since the sheets are changed between every guest, the comforter is really only washed
about once a week!
Yuck…
And that fancy, decorative blanket at the end of the bed?
It’s actually there to protect the linens from your luggage...and it hardly ever gets
washed.
Don’t even go there!
So, what other tricks do hotels use to signal to their guests that their room is clean and
freshly made up?
Well, have you ever wondered why the toilet paper in hotel rooms is always folded?
All over the world, from the fanciest hotels to the most basic hostels, you’ll find the
end of the roll of toilet paper folded into all kinds of shapes.
From a simple triangle to more intricate shapes like flowers and swans, toilet paper origami
has taken on a life of its own.
It may seem wasteful, since that tiny piece of art is just going to end up being destroyed,
but there is a reason behind it.
Just like with tightly tucked sheets, folded toilet paper assures guests that their room
has been professionally cleaned.
There’s another trick at play here, too.
Housekeepers don’t always change the toilet paper roll between every guest - there’s
no need to be wasteful and throw away a perfectly good, half-full roll.
But there’s nothing worse than a guest finding an empty toilet paper roll in their bathroom
- it immediately makes them question whether their room was properly cleaned.
So, hotels came up with an ingenious way to ensure that their housekeepers never miss
this small but important step.
By making it part of the housekeeper’s standard checklist to fold the end of the toilet paper
roll, then by default they would have to check that the roll is not empty before they can
fold the paper.
By putting the focus on the fold, the important step of replacing the roll never gets missed.
In case you’re curious, researchers actually figured out just how much time is spent on
toilet paper origami.
They figured out that it takes about 1 hour per year, per hotel room just to fold a simple
triangle every time the room is turned over.
Globally, that adds up to more than 10 million man hours or more than 5 thousand man years
of folding every year in all of the hotels around the world!
As shocking as that may be, some research suggests that toilet paper origami actually
leads to higher tips for housekeepers.
So, if you enjoyed your bathroom art, be sure to show your appreciation with a good tip!
And that’s just the toilet paper!
Hotel housekeepers do many other little things to make sure they’ve completed their cleaning
checklist and reassure us that our room is fresh and clean.
Some hotels, especially fancier resorts, have their housekeepers fold bath towels into origami
shapes like swans and leave them on the bed, which ensures that you get fresh towels and
signals that both the bed and the towels are clean.
Housekeepers also have to make sure they lay out the complimentary swag like shampoo and
conditioner, soap, pens and notepads.
Just like with the toilet paper fold, having to arrange the toiletries in a certain way
acts like a built-in check-point for the housekeepers, ensuring that they have cleaned each area
and run through a mental checklist of supplies to be refilled.
As guests, these carefully designed displays once again make us feel like our room was
prepared just for us.
Also, did you know that hotels actually want you to steal the soap and pens?
That’s why the hotel’s logo is on so many of these small items - it’s free advertising,
after all.
Just don’t try stealing the bath robes and blaming it on us!
After learning all about the sneaky ways hotels assure us that our rooms are clean, you may
be left wondering - what other bizzare things do hotels do to get us to part with our hard-earned
money?
Of course, there’s the infamous mini-bar racket.
Hotels know exactly how confusing guests find it to navigate their menu of free versus paid
items - in fact, they’re counting on it!
By making a few items free and placing them right next to items that are decidedly not
free, and probably way overpriced, they know that you are more likely to just grab that
chocolate bar you’ve been eying, rather than walk across the room to double-check
the menu and make sure it’s on the “free” list.
Even worse are the mini-bars with motion sensors!
These fridges are rigged up with motion sensors that can tell when you so much as nudge an
item, let alone pick it up to read the label and contemplate opening it.
The hope is that you’ll just go ahead and consume it once it’s in your hand, since
you’ll worry that you’ve been charged already...or that you’ll forget to check
your bill and ask to have the charge reversed after check out.
You might think fleeing the minibar and escaping to the real bar in the lobby will protect
your wallet, but there are more surprises in store for you there.
Perhaps you’re planning to have one quick drink before retiring to your room, but before
you know it you’re more than a few drinks in and are trying to decide if you should
just stay up all night at this point.
You can thank those “free” snacks at the bar for getting you into this pickle.
These supposedly free, salty snacks are designed to make you thirstier so that - you guessed
it - you’ll buy more drinks.
Speaking of bars...can you imagine if that bar charged you extra to have ice in your
drinks?
That may seem crazy to us now, but it was not all that long ago that you would have
been charged by the cube!
Before refrigerators and freezers could be found in every home, most people simply had
an ice box stocked with large blocks of ice to keep their perishables cold, and icy-cold
drinks were an expensive luxury.
Hotels were one of the few places where icey cold drinks could be found, and stocking enough
ice to meet the needs of their bars was an astronomical cost.
Once ice makers came on the market, hotels were some of the earliest and most enthusiastic
customers, and nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find a hotel without an ice bucket in each
room and a free ice machine on each floor.
At least we can thank hotels for making free ice the norm!
So, what do you think of these tricks that hotels use to look cleaner and fancier, and
to get us to spend more?
Do you think it will influence your future hotel experiences?
Be sure and let us know in the comments!
If you thought this video was enlightening, you’ll definitely want to check out this
illuminating video, titled Why Is It Illegal to Cut Off Mattress Tags (And Other Weird
Laws).
Short-sheeting might be the least of your mattress worries!
As always, thanks for watching, and don’t forget to like, share and subscribe!