Often, at that sort of hotel, guests are given a chit at check-in that the guest then presents at the restaurant for the free breakfast. Thus, outside people eating there pay $8.99, while guests “pay” by handing over their breakfast card. It sounds like your hotel, though, wasn’t following this system.
Ref the small hijack back on Page 2 about buying baby equipment pre- or post- birth, here’s a fairly recent thread on topic. Buying stuff for the baby before or after birth. - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
As a frequent traveler in the US, I see the midrange+ US hotels starting to install the 2-step flush toilets and the keycard-activates-the-electrics switches. The latter is OK in the rooms where they left the HVAC controls off the switch. But when the HVAC is on that switch, you end up with lots of frozen or baked hotel rooms. Which is not happy.
As to problems getting locked out …
My employer buys about 10,000 hotel rooms per night. With that many people out & about, naturally a few people have more trouble getting locked out of their room than others. I’ve heard a few tales of folks being fired the 3rd time they showed up at some front desk au naturel, having somehow (??!) locked themselves out of their room yet again.
Over 130 replies and (as far as I could see) not one mention of the ubiquitous electronic safe.
I guess they’re not so ubiquitous. Actually, now that you mention it, I have seen a few. In one hotel I remember putting the tiny shampoos in it. They were great shampoos.
Well, I wouldn’t have mentioned the electronic safe because it’s relatively ubiquitous in American hotels. No idea whether it’s common overseas.
In Turkey (at any rate, where I stayed), the hotel room bathrooms did not have a separate shower / bathtub area like in other countries I’ve visited. The bathroom was one room completely paved with stone (walls and floor), with a shower faucet in one corner of the room. There was no shower curtain or door. I was concerned about getting the towel and toilet paper wet, so I moved them outside the bathroom before I took a shower.
In Soviet Russia, hotel bible packs you in dresser drawer.
This is called a wet room. They also seem to be common in Mexico, too.
That’s the norm in India. The bathrooms are designed so that the water can be poured or sprayed everywhere. In fact, many Indians are suspicious of bathrooms with dry floors and toilet seats because it looks to them like it hasn’t been cleaned recently.
Seen them in many Asian countries, at least in hotels above, say, the backpacker level.
Common in Southeast Asia, too.
Wet rooms occur, but have not been common in European hotels that I have stayed in. In my experience, they are more likely to occur in homes, not hotels. I suspect that wet rooms may be more common in hot climates (or hot houses), as the room will dry quickly after a shower completely wets the floor. They do not make much sense in a climate where the bathroom will remain wet and uncomfortable for a long period after.
However, to contradict this, I was visiting a patient in an Irish hospital last weekend. i noted that the en suite bathroom in her semi-private room was a wet room.
I can see where they might do those in hospitals. For the convenience of some patients whose condition may entail making a big wet mess when trying to clean up, or when the nurses need to do it for them.
I think more important is that a wet room is a walk-in facility: you just walk (or hobble, or whatever) right up to the shower and use it. No clambering in and out of baths, no tripping over edges of shower trays, no wrestling with shower doors, no trying to bathe yourself in a confined space…
Maybe they’re cheaper to install, too?
Significant parts of India are quite humid much of the year; thus, wet bathrooms often stay wet for much of the day. People wear designated bathroom slippers to avoid getting their feet wet.
Just a comment-the last time I stayed at a Marriot hotel, I had nothing to read…so I reached for the BOM.
Some fundamentalist Christian had been at it-and written elaborate notes on the pages, refuting the stuff in the book.
It was kind of amusing-shoulda have stolen the book.
“You steal the Bible, you go to Hell, that’s the rule!”
I always thought Gideon bibles were meant to be taken with you? :smack:
How many have you taken, TruCelt? 
I suspect the Gideons don’t mind if someone is interested enough to take one of their bibles.
They do for “frequent travellers”. All Hilton’s I’ve stayed at have a special concierge lounge with breakfast if you are “gold”.
I’ve seen them in Mexico, but I think they’re less than the norm, though. If “wet room” is the correct name, then I kind of want to make my own personal bathroom kind of the same. You can’t find me-sized tubs these days, so why not dispense with it entirely?
An another note, I just returned from China, and although I only have two hotels to report on, they both had separate showers from tubs, and both had hot water pots and French presses if you wanted coffee. The coffee was universally horrible. At the Shanghai hotel, the shower had a cool Venetian blind so that the people in the room could potentially watch the showerer shower. This is kind of like some “hoteles de paso” that I know in Mexico, except that the latter is really, really low-end, and the former was very, very high-end.