Do you use hotel towels or bring your own

[Butterfly98]

Conversation I had earlier with a friend has put me right off using hotel towels! She's an assistant manager of a 4 star hotel and said after 2 wedding receptions over Easter weekend some of the bath towels had to be thrown out where guests had been sick after too much alcohol and looked like they used the towels to clean up etc some in one room had worse on it (you can use your imagination). This can happen fairly regularly and the room cleaners wear gloves to put towels and bedding into one bag and clean toilet etc and then wearing the same gloves leave out fresh towels and change the beds with all those germs transferred! Then they move on to the next room and are on a strict timeframe to get them all done as quickly as possible! Laundry decides if towels should be thrown depending on how soiled they are but it all sounds disgusting to me! It's not practical to bring bath towels for all the family especially if going abroad but now after having a nice shower do you really want to wrap yourself up in one of these towels? Thoughts please! Btw I'm not totally OCD about cleanliness though I might sound it!!

I wonder how people who fuss about this cope if or when they go into hospital. After all, you can hardly ask the ambulance driver to take a diversion past your home so you can pick up some clean sheets and towels.

@sweeneytoddsrazor that vision has cracked me up lol 😂😂😂😂😂

I've stayed in thousands of hotels all over the world and never caught 'hotel sickness'.

How ridiculous. No, of course I don't take my own towels, or bedding, when I stay in a hotel. How exactly would that work when I'm on a six week multi city/country trip? Lugging damp dirty towels around the world would be far more germy than using a clean, recently washed one from the hotel itself.

I have severe allergies. I have to bring my own towels and bedding.

Traveling light is not an option.

My family uses the hotel linens.

"I used to be a chamber maid and they used the same cloth for the toilet as they do the cups".

"By “they” presumably you mean “we” CoolCoolKat? Because otherwise you’d have blown the whistle, wouldn’t you, and the rest of your story would be about your colleagues being fired".

No. By 'they' I mean 'they'. My fellow chambermaids when I was a student. No I didnt get them all sacked, I just thought, 'ew'.

I'm very fussy about hygiene but I use hotel towels without a second thought. They've been laundered and probably have less bacteria on them than all the surfaces you touch.

When I go into a hotel room the first thing I do is use a dettol wipe on the door handles, sink area, desk, toilet seat and handle. Then I wash the cups and boil the kettle once (discarding the first lot of water).

Unless the previous guest had notovirus or some other highly contagious illness, that could transfer from the chamber maid's gloves to the clean linen, I'm not sure what you're worried of catching?

I've stayed in lots of hotels, including abroad in countries with poor sanitation and cockroaches galore! I've never picked up a skin condition or contagious illness while travelling.

I remember being on course at work and the facilitator (I forget why) decided to challenge our perceptions by asking us, if you bought a bed second hand, would you happily just climb straight into bed when you got it home, or would you want to clean or ditch anything off of it? The sheets? The mattress? Most people went for throwing away the mattress and duvet, boil washing the sheets and wiping down the bed frame. And then he asks, how do you feel about sleeping in a hotel bed? It's clean, but it's much more than second hand - countless bodies have been in it. Based on that I don't know if it's weird how much we worry about hotel germs or how little. I'm guessing this is one of those kind of monkey-brain natural reactions, of revulsion at the idea of someone we don't know sleeping where we sleep, eating where we eat etc and whether hotels work for you or not depends on how well the hotel manages to preserve for you the illusion of a freshly minted new room. For me the illusion dies if I drop something under the bed and go down there and see fluff. Then I feel uncomfortable all night. I'm not going to claim it's rational, it's a feeling, feelings aren't rational. Anyway we're in a slightly grotty Airbnb right now where I had to put all the kitchen stuff through the dishwasher and wipe down all the surfaces and cupboard interiors because they were visibly dirty so I wouldn't turn the nose up at a hotel room right now!

Bottom line... I can't be arsed to start cleaning somewhere I have paid to stay in. If I got to a hotel room I had paid for and I thought it didn't look up to spec, I would ring housekeeping and ask them to sort it. I am not going away with rubber gloves, washing up liquid, bacterial wipes, towels and bedding.

I think the germs hysteria has got totally out of hand

Gilbert1A I always take a tshirt to go over the pillow if you're going to do that why not take a pillowcase??

This. I want to know why too!

I have a mental picture of a pillow with arms.

I travel for work a lot and always take a towel but not for hygiene purposes but because I have very vivid dyed red hair and feel embarrassed leaving red dye all over the hotel towels🤣

people who worry about this sort of thing have an over anxious disposition. Our modern life with so few real dangers (we aren’t getting eaten by tigers any more, or starving to death if the rains are late (in this country)) so people have more time and energy to worry about meaningless bullshit.

I love using all the hotel towels.
Most hotels use a laundry service.
Many care Homes use a laundry service.
Not all laundry services separate hotel and care home laundry.
Good hotels will check sheets and towels for stains and return to laundry as rejects.

I suspect it's mercifully rare that people boil their pants in the kettle. And I'll continue to take the chance of "towel poisoning" before I start lugging around towels in my luggage rather than use the freshly laundered ones the hotel provides,

Some of these are somewhat over the top. I just wrap myself entirely in cling film whenever I leave the house. I find that protects me from most germs

That's it Gilbert !

I never leave a hotel room in a mess but I use everything there is going! Especially when we've stayed somewhere luxurious.

It doesn't do to think too hard about hotel room germs... Saying that, when you think about it, there are germs everywhere, all the time, on every public thing we go near. Door handles, supermarket trolleys, items on shop shelves. Virtually everything we ever touch has been handled by someone else.

It's honestly never occurred to me to pack my own towels or bedding for a hotel. I stay in hotels perhaps 15-20 nights a year, and have yet to catch anything from a hotel room, as far as I know!

No. I use the ones that are there, and the cups and glasses, and the bed.

No, I have never taken towels to a hotel, and if anyone told me that they did, I'd be backing off slowly.

I couldn't give a shit what was on the towels before they are washed, so long as they're clean by the time they reach me.

Never use the glasses, I worked as a chamber maid in a chain hotel when I was at uni and my colleagues used the same cloth to wipe the bathroom floors to then just wipe round the glasses, they never went down to the kitchen dishwasher as it was just too much hassle to carry.

I was also told to just sniff the sheets and if they hardly looked used to just tuck them back in again and smooth them out as changing the bedding was hard graft.

My hotel was mainly used for nights out in the city and weddings and as you say, people would frequently be sick on the beds, in the bath, on the towels etc and just cover it up with another towel etc., leaving it disgusting for us to clean up, with no apology or tip.

The problem was it was a hard physical job with not enough time to do everything so you had to cut corners somewhere to turn the rooms around in time.

Jesus. I despair of ridiculously paranoid and germaphobic people are on here. And always about the wrong things.

No of course I don't bring my own towels, and I would think anyone who did was bloody daft.

I travel frequently for both work and pleasure and have stayed in hotels all over the world. Some admittedly more salubrious than others, but overall I've lived to tell the tale. I've certainly never brought towels from home, I don't even wash the cups and glasses before use. I may be persuaded to give the kettle a quick swirl under the tap if it looks a bit dubious, but that's the extent of my hygiene precautions.

That said, I have a very good friend who travels everywhere with her own bed linen and towels. But she also sadly suffers from OCD and PTSD.

I suspect it's mercifully rare that people boil their pants in the kettle

Why would you even need to?
There is a sink and a bath with hot running water and soap handily nearby.
Do people boil elasticated things at home? Of course not.

So why would a hotel be different?

Just more made up nonsense.