Just last year we were at the Sunshine Suites on Grand Cayman. All their rooms had ceiling fans. A lot of rooms at beach destinations have them.
We just came back from 10 days at the Atlantis Palm in Dubai. Our room had a light fixture on the ceiling.
I see neither at most hotels in the states. Depends where you go, I guess.
Maintenance and cleaning is a huge factor especially due to accidental damage and/or vandalism.
There are a couple other logical reasons.
All ceiling fans transmit vibrations through the ceiling and floor above, especially if they are not installed correctly, balanced properly, knocked out of equilibrium, or just wear out. This becomes an annoyance for the guests staying in the room above. More expensive models may eliminate most of this “noise” …but those aren’t the models hotels would be installing.
Fire code regulations dictate that nothing can obstruct the spray pattern of the sprinkler heads. A ceiling fan could possibly interfere with this. Also, you don’t really want to spray water on an electric motor.
Most modern hotels are built with concrete floors and ceilings. Any ceiling electrical fixtures would need to be included in the original building plans and the conduit, boxes, stubs,etc. would need to be installed before the pouring.
I’m with the OP though, hotel rooms can be stuffy and air conditioner noisy. It would be nice to have something to quietly provide a little air movement so the room doesn’t feel like a tomb.
If you need white noise to sleep, couldn’t you just stream a white noise recording on your smartphone?
Or tune the radio to an unused frequency between FM stations? You used to be able to get white noise by switching the TV to channel 3 or 4 (whichever was unassigned in your area), now every hotel room has a TV, but many are on cable systems that don’t have any unused channels.
I don’t disagree with this, but I think the OP is mistaken about the number of people who need or want an ceiling fan and only a ceiling fan to sleep. Sure, lots of people can’t sleep if it’s too hot/stuffy and lots can’t sleep in complete silence, but I suspect air conditioning will take care of the hot/stuffy issue and either the air conditioning or the tv/radio/music on phone will take care of the silence for most of them.
The air conditioning fan will usually work for me as long as I can manually set it to always on. Having A/C always turning on and off during the night is worse for me noise-wise than nothing.
OP here. I actually hate having a fan blowing at me when I’m trying to sleep … but my boyfriend says he prefers the slight, constant breeze. A former roommate of mine was the same way, she could not sleep without a draft or breeze blowing at her.
So he was bitching a little about not sleeping well and said he was looking forward to sleeping under a fan again. Made me curious, that’s all.
What kind of ceiling fans do you have? Pretty much all the ones I’ve ever been around are virtually silent.
If you want want white noise in a hotel, the AC/heater will typically have a way to turn the fan on so it blows continually. The AC my cycle on and off depending on temperature, but the fan will stay on the whole time.
I haven’t really been paying attention to such things, but I vaguely recall that many hotel rooms have relatively low ceilings, which would make sticking a ceiling fan up there both less useful and more dangerous.
My guess is because white noise is an “off-label” purpose for ceiling fans (the primary purpose being heat management - not needed in most hotel rooms) that very few people “need.”
Also, as a person that does appreciate white noise, ceiling fans suck for that purpose. Pedestal or box fans are vastly superior. Youtube “fan white noise,” ceiling fans don’t even come close to the top of the list (I gave up before I got to one).
My cousin who’s in commercial construction pointed out how they build most hotels now – a steel frame with floor/ceiling slabs poured off-site, trucked in, and dropped in place with a crane. You can actually see the individual slabs in a lot of hotel ceilings, they run the whole length of the room but are only maybe 8’ wide. Any hotels utilizing this construction method won’t have anything attached to the ceiling, obviously, unless via conduit. There’s no hvac, plumbing, or electric in those slabs.
Every place I’ve ever stayed in the Caribbean has had ceiling fans.
If you need the background noise of a fan to sleep, when you travel away from home, there are numerous FREE apps for your smartphone, that will play a variety of noises to help you sleep.
In March I stayed at a Homewood Suites in Dover, NJ (~30 miles west of NYC) that had a ceiling fan in the bedroom. I actually took a picture of it and posted it to Facebook!
Interesting. Why is that? Why are hotels build differently than apartment buildings?
I wonder if they are. The last condo buildings I’ve been in seem to have a higher ceiling in the living spaces with nothing on them, but a slightly lower ceiling in say the corridors or bathrooms that has enough clearance for air conditioning ducts, etc. If I recall correctly, electrical fixtures only seemed present in this lower ceiling and not the higher ceiling. I suspect the higher ceiling was this concrete slab thing …
I’ve noticed that kind of thing before; didn’t know that’s what it was.
Prefabbing as much as possible, off-site, is usually cost-effective, and if a ceiling/floor isn’t going to have any utilities going through it, why not build it this way?
As someone who – reluctantly, occasionally – stays in hotel rooms, the last thing I want is a ceiling fan.
Both moving air and white noise. I leave the furnace blower going in my house 24/7 for the same reasons, but a HVAC unit in a typical hotel room accomplishes the same thing.
Ceiling Fans also get dirty and many hotel ceilings are pre-stressed concrete making it difficult to run wiring.
TL;DR all the posts answer: Nobody cares enough to make it worth the trouble and expense of put ceiling fans in a hotel room.
In an even smaller nutshell: If it doesn’t make money, don’t do it!
