walkitout: (Default)
Nella Acceber ([personal profile] walkitout) wrote2022-04-24 04:48 pm

Random thoughts about daily housekeeping in hotels

I’ll try to keep this short. If I fail, I’ll retitle this as A Few Remarks, to warn people better.

Years ago, I posted about the conflict between hotel union workers desire for hotel union work — notably, housekeeping — to continue as before, and the desire for a lot of us to be a lot easier on the environment by reducing the amount of cleaning, of towels, sheets, etc.

I was reminded of this when a friend sent me a link about Clean the World (https://thehustle.co/the-surprising-afterlife-of-used-hotel-soap/amp/); it’s a great circular economy article, and you can find additional coverage about Clean the World in the usual places like waste360 and similar. I thought, hey, I wonder what the long term impact of the last few years have been on the hotel housekeeping dynamic? Answer: daily housekeeping went away, and is now mostly staying away. There is some opt-in, and luxury brands have retained more frequent housekeeping, but the default has definitely moved in the direction I wanted it to go. And yes, the union workers are complaining. This is absolutely going to be another boomer v. Millenial thing. Term of the day: skimpflation.

Sample coverage: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hotels-end-basic-amenities-no-more-housekeeping-skimpflation/

I’ll probably be back with more skimpflation, if it is being used elsewhere, but may be a different post if it is broadly used outside this one area / author.