You betcha. I travel the same amount per month. All over North America. Hotel annoyances?
º Non Smoking rooms that reek.
º Idiots who steal the " Do Not Disturb " door-hang off of my door knob. Fuckers. Sometimes I work late. Last week in Florida, I worked 7:00pm-4:30 am. Had to make sure to tell the front desk when I checked in. TELL HOUSEKEEPING !! No matter what they see on my door knob, do not knock. For any reason.
º Poor noise insulation overall. Older hotels are much quieter. New ones are utterly crappy in terms of construction.
º Frequently the shower head simply sucks. Speakman, people. Speakman. Brutally harsh streams of water, economical in terms of water flow. A good shower is everything.
º Inaccurate or out-dated in-room data on local restaurants, etc. Sure I can use Google on the laptop. Why should I have to?
º It’s hard working at a service job, especially on overnights. When someone is on their game, I email the corporate offices with an attaboy. If I email about negatives, I should email about positives.
º Lack of luggage carts. Please. Be a decent guest. You use the cart? Unless you are facing some kind of personal emergency, take 5 minutes and walk the freaking cart back downstairs. Single exception: Las Vegas. One can easily spend 10-15 minutes walking from their room to the front desk. In this case, leave the luggage cart near the elevator banks.
º Do repairs. If the door key cannot open the front door after hours and you are pounding on the door of your hotel, something is wrong. Get things fixed.
º Be a decent guest. Hell, be a decent human being. The rest rooms in the lobby are not there for you to explore your defecatory skills. You wouldn’t spread human waste all over your home bathroom, would you? Why in the world would you wreck a public rest room?
º If you work the front desk and your motel only has a single wireless router with no amplifiers or repeaters, you know damned well which rooms suck for internet. If a guest is staying in your hotel to get work done instead of using your hotel to be a tourist, have a heart. When they come down to ask if there are rooms that have good wireless, tell them and shift their room without bitching. You go through this every day. When someone is checking in and asks for the wireless access code, put them somewhere where they can do their work.
º Most chain hotels now allow guests to keep their towels for the duration of their stay. All should. If yours doesn’t, start the program.
And so on…
If you are making your reservations online, you need to call the individual motel and tell them that you are going to be a party of 30+ bikers and it would be a good idea to put you all together, some place away from other guests. I’ve found that special requests on the online booking site are useless.
That said, I’ve stayed in plenty of places at the same time as a group of bikers, and they are far less trouble than many other groups! Girls sports teams - shudder…
I was working on a project in eastern Utah during the natural gas boom. It was a small town (Duschene) with only a couple of hotels. The lobby was full of Texas roughnecks and the parking lot was filled with work vehicles of varying sizes. As evening approached, I was shocked at how quiet it was. I went to sleep easily. Around 3 AM, suddenly all the doors started opening and banging shut. Then, the entire parking lot started up at the same time. The building was actually shaking, and the noise was deafening. It was a shift change in the gas fields. Soon all the vehicles left and just as I was falling back to sleep, the workers who had just been relieved arrived and the whole thing repeated itself.
I ended up staying in a fleabag motel 20 miles away just so I could sleep.
I love the hotels which have enough wattage focused on their parking lots and building to be seen from space. Ah, well, at least the glow allows me to see my way across the room at 3am if I need to read something 10 feet away.
Then there was the motel about a mile off the highway in bumfuck Wyoming that was mostly filled to the gills when I arrived at about midnight.
At about 3am the world’s longest and loudest train took about 5 minutes to saunter past the place. Half of us were outside going “what the fuck?” as it passed right outside the fence across the narrow parking lot from the motel.
At 3:20am we got a repeat performace.
Then another one at 5am.
I just got up at that point, cleaned up, checked out and left.
Keep them in your room, and I’ll keep my annoyance to myself. I understand that. (At least up until 11 o’clock or so, I’ll understand it. ) It’s the parents that let the kids use the hallways for track meets and shrieking that irritate the fuck out of me. And the front desks that don’t chase the kids back into their rooms.
And heaven forbid you should have a curtain in your room that actually blocks outside light. Next trip we take, I have to remember to pack some clips to try and get more light-blocking happening (or just go find some nightshades for our eyes).
Unfortunately, that depends on the hotel/motel’s configuration. At the one where I work, all of the king non-smoking rooms are grouped together; all of the double non-smokings are grouped together; all of the smoking rooms are in one building; etc. So if you were staying at our place, your rooms would be scattered all over, unless everyone got together ahead of time to say “yeah, we’ll all reserve non-smoking kings.” (And that might not be possible anyway, since those rooms might already be booked for another event.) Does someone from your group deal with a sales director or manager to block rooms for your get-togethers? If not, consider it. (And, for the record, I’d much rather have a group of bikers at our hotel than many others that have been mentioned, including sports teams of any age, and - especially - weddings or family reunions.)
As for all of the other crap that guests do at hotels that makes me crazy? The list is too long to mention! (Occupational hazard.) As a clerk, I try to mitigate stuff that makes the guests nuts - put the business travelers in the rooms with halfway okay internet service, put families with kids on the ground floor at multi-floor hotels, on busy nights, check in rooms “sequentially” - so that room 325 isn’t asleep already when 326 comes in slamming doors and stuff. On slower nights, I’ll check in 323, then 325, then 327. If we’re not going to fill up, no sense in everyone having to hear everyone else…
You guys have not lived until you fly into a city at 10PM and decide to just stop by the office on the way to the hotel, find a problem with some new equipment and wind up working until 2AM.
Go to the hotel fall fast asleep only to have the fire alarm go off at 3:59AM.
It then takes the FD at least 45 minutes to give the all clear so they will turn off the alarm.
At that point say why bother and go have breakfast and go to work.
You haven’t lived until a high-speed chase ends in the ditch in front of the hotel, and police from three agencies are swarming through the property at 3 am, chasing the dude who is now trying to escape on foot…
He made lots of high-pitched girly screams when the officers tazered him. Right next to the 200 building.
(Moral of story? If you’re gonna get drunk, sideswipe a police cruiser, try to drive away real fast through three jurisdictions, and then try to get away on foot? Don’t. Really.)
Seriously? You’re complaining that people came back to the hotel around 9:30pm? That is hardly the middle of the night when most people would be asleep.
Yeah, what the hell is with that, anyway? They seem to always have sheers that reach all the way across, then some kind of bullshit drapes that don’t meet in the middle, leaving a 6" to one foot gap. I guess it’s so you can admire that merc-vapor streetlight all night long.
Just this morning (0430) I was awoken by slamming doors and loud. voices in the hall. After about 10 minutes I decided to get up and see what the commotion was all about, There was a large man standing at the door of the room next door having a conversation with the person inside.
I asked him to keep it down, adding the obvious fact that people were trying to sleep, His reaction: he stepped away from the door, walked up to me and said, “Shut your fucking mouth and go back in your fucking room!”
Did I mention that the man was LARGE? I went back
In my room, put in my earplugs, and once I calmed down, managed to get back to sleep. I’ve stayed in many hotels over the years, but i’ve never been threatened by another guest. (this was at a mid-range Best Western in Colorado)
Or some big diesel truck making some sort of delivery to the hotel at 4 in the morning. Of course, they leave the damn truck idling for the 15 minutes the delivery takes.
The one I could do without is the abuse/rape porn. One of the last times I was in a hotel, the bad quality of the audio was the hint that what I was hearing was probably porn, buuuutttttt…
I asked the front desk and it was a man alone, next room to mine - yeah, yeah, I’m a square, whatever, I’d still rather not be awakened by a woman crying and a man saying “hey, since you’re here, you may as well blow me. You better blow me.” For some movies, less dialogue is better.
) It’s the parents that let the kids use the hallways for track meets and shrieking that irritate the fuck out of me. And the front desks that don’t chase the kids back into their rooms.