Every hotel I’ve ever been to pretty much, I’ve always been annoyed at their lighting system. They seem to only have table and floor lamps that put out wholly inadequate amounts of light. Why is this?
Cheaper to buy 400 lamps in bulk than to pay an electrician the countless hours it would take to wire every room with ceiling lamps. WAG
It’s easier and safer for housekeeping to replace a bulb in a lamp than a bulb in an overhead fixture. Overhead lighting also tends to be harsher than the indirect lighting of lamps, and having several lamps instead of a single or multiple overhead lights makes setting a mood in a hotel room (which are often occupied by people on vacation or trysting) easier. Also WAGs on my part.
Probably makes replacing broken fixtures and remodeling much simpler; no electricians needed, just swap it out.
Here’s a neat little tidbit, yeah, you have to pay the electrician to do the wiring, but you may wind up with a problem (durning construction anyways) if you don’t let the carpenters cut the holes in the drywall.
As noted, remodeling is simpler with fixtures not requiring the services of an electrician.
The construction may not be what it appears to be. I’ve seen motel/hotels and apartment buildings with cast concrete ceiling/floor panels and a light texture finish to make you think it’s drywall.
Also, consider fire resistive construction. If I permit no penetrations to the ceiling plane of a occupancy other than sprinkler heads, the resistance to vertical fire spread is improved.
Most of my hotel use is for business and I despair of ever getting a room with good enough lighting outside the little puddle I may or may not get directly at the desk. Even for a tryst, I’d like better lighting.
I wonder if it also has the bonus of making the flaws in the room less noticeable?
I’ve been staying the past month and a half at a Candlewood Suites in SW Michigan. They have overhead lights. Come to think of it, the last place I stayed (other than Candlewood) also had one overhead light (on a ceiling fan). Maybe it’s a long stay vs short stay thing?
Almost every hotel I’ve stayed at has overhead lights in the foyer - by the front door and closet, and in the bathroom - just not in the main part of the room. So I don’t buy the cheaper to build argument, or the cheaper to swap out lights. Pretty much every place I’ve been has sent a maintenance guy to change the lightbulb.
I’d guess the reason is that they’d still need the same amount of task lighting - at the desk, by the bed, and by any chairs they have. During the day you can get light by opening the curtains. Not having overhead lights saves on electricity and bulbs to some extent. The foyer light is of course needed when you come into a dark room.
My point regarding that was more the safety issue. Maintenance or housekeeping or whoever can change bulbs in a table lamp without sending anyone up a ladder. It’s also more efficient to be able to change bulbs on the fly rather than having to haul that ladder from room to room.
I work for the largest hotel in my town – I’ll try to remember to ask about this when I go to work today. However, I have no idea what the lighting situation is like in our rooms. Since I’m neither housekeeping nor maintenance, I’m strictly forbidden to enter the rooms.
In many motels I’ve seen, the ceiling/floor is a monolithic concrete slab - carpeted on top and maybe sprayed with cottage cheese finish on the bottom. There would be no effective place to run the wires.
Now I’m curious, what do you do?
I’m a dishwasher 
I actually do my work at the city convention center next door, but I’m employed by the hotel, which contracts with the city to staff the convention center. My “strictly forbidden” comment refers to corporate policy, and probably has to do with liability and security issues. Basically, there is a small handful of job classifications with very specific legitimate reasons for needing to enter the guest rooms, and if you’re not in one of those classifications you can be fired on the spot if you’re caught in a guest room.
Those who are authorized to enter rooms have keys (keycards, actually), and those keys are accounted for after every shift. So if a guest’s property turns up missing from their room and employee theft is suspected, the list of suspects is narrowed down, from hundreds of employees to just those who had keys during the time frame in question. There are other procedures in place, but since I don’t have any reason to enter a room, I’m not familiar with them.
In any case, I’m now way off-topic.
It can be done. You have to think ahead and lay the conduit in the concrete forms before the concrete is poured.
How about ease of redecorating? If you decide to change the location of the beds or get rid of a bed completely from a 2-bed setup, it’d be relatively easy for the maintenance man to move the lamp to the new location. Moving ceiling mounted lights may be more difficult, having to use a ladder and maybe cutting the ceiling.
It could be about style. Eye-level lamps can set the tone for the room, along with the wallpaper, bed covers, and carpeting. They look more homey. To me, ceiling lights remind me of institutions, like hospitals or dormitories. When I’m away from home, I want to sleep in a homey place, not an institution. Well, voluntarily at least. [chuckle]
Here in Japan, all rooms I’ve stayed in have overhead lighting and lamps on the desk and bedside tables. The overhead lights are just too bright for those small rooms. I can see all the imperfections in the wallpaper, carpeting and furniture. Ugh, keep some of the mystery alive.
Hotels where you can unzip yourself in the dark! What a country!
I finally got to talk to the general manager of my hotel today, and posed the question to her (she’s been in the hotel business for decades – or 100 years, as she put it – so I’d say she’s an ‘expert’).
The simple answer is that hotels/motels are attempting to recreate the atmosphere of “home” in each room. Specifically, the living room, which in most houses and apartments has no built-in overhead lighting. Using multiple floor and table lamps allows either the hotel or the guest to move the lighting around to (theoretically) create the desired mood/atmosphere.
Furthermore, the current trend is to increase the level of “customization” available to the guest by equipping the lamps with longer power cords, making it possible to place lamps just about anywhere in the room. In our hotel, the lamps are fitted with 25-foot cords. Same thing with the telephone - a longer cord allows a guest to move around the room while talking on the phone, just like they would be able to do at home.
I mentioned some of the guesses made by posters here, such as poured-concrete construction making it difficult to wire the ceilings, and liability/difficulty issues of sending people up ladders to change lightbulbs, and she said that those are also considerations, but the primary reason is still “atmosphere”.
Hope that answers the OP satisfactorily 
Interesting. When we moved into our house, about the first thing we did was to get an electrician to install fixtures on the ceilings of rooms without them. Clearly, ideas about atmosphere vary.
I’ve never even thought about moving lights around in a room. I wonder how many people do this.