Welcome to Hotel Hell.

While guides that rate hotels wax about the sauna, conference rooms, Health club, gourmet restauarant and business center, these are all features most travellers use only occasionally and could, if needed, go elsewhere to get. The guides often ignore the "kiss of death" defects that interfere with the primary and unavoidable uses of a hotel room: A good night's sleep, a chance to get clean, and sometimes just a private, quiet place to read, make a phone call, or watch TV. Here are the things we wish hotel guides would warn us about so we could avoid establishments with these features.

Heating/cooling systems that won't maintain a reasonable temperature and constant sound level

Why is it that you only visit the places that say they never need air conditioning during their freak hot spell, when someone across the road is having an all night firecracker fest? All hotel rooms should have a heating/cooling unit that can be set to run the fan continuously and make only quiet humming noises when the heat/cooling cycles on/off. I believe the designer of those units which insist on shutting everything off when they think the temperature is "right", then come on with a set of clanks and booms when needed should be condemned to sleeping in a room full of these things for the rest of their lives. As an electrical engineer, I've never understood why heating/cooling systems need relays make a noise like a flyswatter. Indeed, I've never even seen relays like this, but often a quiet unit is made unbearable because ever time the compressor comes on it makes a noise like someone swatting a fly on a large piece of sheet metal.

The sound amplifying metal door

Again, I've lived in several houses and appartments and never encountered doors with the particular sound amplifying qualities of those used in many hotels. A whisper in the hallway sounds like someone shouting in your room. Why can't hotels seal and insulate the doors?

Flimsy sound transparent construction

The door is of course just one problem, but one that stands out as the weak link on some otherwise well constructed facilities. Also common are those hotels with walls that pass everything and floors/cielings that instantly convert anyone walking in slippers above to the sound of a herd of elephants below.

The bomb in the toilet

No, I'm not kidding, and I'm not making this up. In 3 different hotels over the past 2 months I've encountered toilets that flush with an explosive blast (in one case kicking back the handle so hard it actually sprained my finger before I got used to anticipating it. Being naturally curious about inferior plumbing, I lifted the tank lid and discovered in each case the tank, normally filled with water, was instead filled with an odd assortment of pipes and a large black rubber mass that looked a bit like the bombs in the old cartoon shows. I have no idea what these things are, but they seem to be multiplying. The main problem, other than sprained fingers, is they make so much noise everyone in the building (if not the surrounding city) knows you just flushed a toilet. Not good when you are trying to be quiet at 3AM, or worse yet when 100 people all over the building are getting up and flushing once a night.

The wind ensemble in the plumbing

Bomb toilets are still rare, but plumbing that gurgles, toots, whistles, or otherwise makes obnoxious noises isn't. Why can't hotels simply encase all the pipes in enough sound deadening foam to slience them once and for all?

The New Jersey water torture

I refer, of course, to the "water saving" shower heads that dribble a trickle of random temperature water at you, while often gushing water at some other temperature out the tub spount at your feet. I don't mean to pick on the garden state, but this is a feature I first encountered often there while travelling, at a time when I also visited California, Colorado, Arizona, and other water starved areas where I always got "normal" showerheads. When I complained I was always told that water restricting showerheads were a state law in New Jersey. I believe the defect comes from sticking a water restricter (perhaps just a penny in the pipe) on plumbing not designed for it. I have nothing against saving water, but providing inadequate water to rinse the soap off, fouling up the temperature control to the extent you spend 5 minutes just getting it tolerable, and dumping gallons of water down the drain for every pint you can get on your head don't save water.

More Dim bulb ideas

Another simple thing hotels have a problem with is lighting. Every hotel room needs a bright (>=150 watt equivalent) light near the bed and one near the desk (if it has a desk). Bad hotels often give you no bright lights at all, or stick them places like the bureau, where you don't need them. Few hotels actually put 3 way bulbs in their 3 way lamps, leading again to needless annoyance. Another question here is why hotels seem to be the lighting industry's guniea pigs for every new energy saving lighting technology? Many hotels now use compact fluorescents, some of which would easily double as strobe lights. An interesting twist I've begun to encounter is exotic lamps of some sort that start off very dim and gradually brighten. Invariably when confronted with this I'll turn on every light in the room in an attempt to get something brighter than a candle to read by, and 5 minutes later feel like I'm on a brightly lit stage. Again, Energy conservation is a very good goal, but isn't accomplished by giving travellers so little light in each bulb that they have to turn on every bulb in the room to get enough light to read by.

Why would I watch $7 movies and drink $3 cokes?

I often wonder whether the minibar and pay-per-view movie facilities now common in hotels are actually intended as guest conveniences, or simply ways of generating revenue through billing errors. It can't be as hard to get the billing right as it seems. Putting me through billing department hell trying to clear fradulent charges does not enhance my stay.

Telephone torture

Can someone tell me why the cheapest fleabag motel usually gives you free local calls and no surcharges on your long distance calls, while the big name fancy hotels often hit you with charges on every call, limits even on 800 calls, and other not-so-insignficant fees. Doesn't my $250 a night cover a few local calls? Though the situation is improving as hotels recognize that travellers carry laptops, some of the same hotels often have "weird" phone systems where you never know what's going to happen to your laptop when you plug it into the jack.

Where's the Juice?

Why is it that the electrical codes, thanks to the disinterested vigilance of the electrical contractors organization, IBEW, and power producers organziation, now require outlets for every 3 feet of wall space in homes, yet in a spacious hotel room you often find only 2 outlets -- One in the bathroom, and one burried behind the bed or bureau with at least half a dozen cords emanting from a lump of outlet extenders and tags warning you that if you dare unplug the TV they will assume you stole it and send the dogs after you. When will hotels realize that people are bringing more, not fewer electrical appliances, and provide at least 2 open outlets, one near the desk and one near the bed.

There is such a thing as being TOO helpful

There is a great Monty Python sketch where most of the staff of a restaurant commits suicide in front of a stunned couple in penance for having allowed speck of dirt on a fork. Some hotels make me feel the same way by leaving little notes about the housekeeping, messages on the voice mail, or what's worst of all, calling you up to let you know that because you had your "do not disturb" sign out they couldn't get in to turn down the bed. Can't these people just ignore the appologies and the personal touches and focus on keeping the black slime in the shower stall under control int the first place?

57 Channels and nothing on

While TV is a standard almost everywhere now, figuring out how to use that hotel TV without discovering you ordered a round of drinks for everyone in the bar while fumbling with the controls is always a trick. Most consumer sets have simple, responsive remote controls that allow you to channel surf at will. Why do hotels always replace them with clunky things that switch channels and volume only after a random delay, if you push the buttons REAL HARD, and only after making a lot of clunking and buzzing noises, and why do these thins always keep returning you to the movie preview channel. Maybe they are hoping some folks will just give up and order one of those dropouts from the film accademy rather than stay with it long enough to figure out where they put CNN or NBC.

Maximum Security Checkin

Why do expensive hotels make it so hard to check in? The cheaper lodgings often pre-print all the information from your reservations take your credit card, and often bill you on the spot, leaving you no hassle the next morning. High priced city hotels, in contrast always reauire you to fill in forms and always have long checkin/checkout lines which seem crammed with "people with problems". (One nice airport hotel in Newark invariably has a long line of passengers and flight crews often with limited English being put up due to cancelled flights, and never more than one person on check in duty.

Hotel ratings I'd love to see

With this in mind, the rating system I wish they'd use is a simple checklist: