I would assume the reputable but cost-cutting hotels would still be doing a full clean between guest visits, just cutting down on the daily room cleaning while a guest is still there.
Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate.
But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, they will inevitably end up with hoarders and people that keep food lying around and then comes cockroaches and rats and odors, etc.
> But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, ...
Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.
This is really the heart of the issue with all these new "disruptive" industries. They're cheaper because they avoid a lot of the regulation, but all that regulation exists for a reason. Whether you're replacing taxis with Uber or hotels with airbnb, you're saving money by allowing room for all the problems that made the regulation necessary in the first place.
The problem here is when regulation moves beyond safety into protectionism, which I submit ALOT of regulation for both hotels and taxis is FAR FAR FAR removed from simply protecting health and safety and instead is more about preventing new entrants into the market and protecting current business models
Could also be compensation for a medallion system the government was forcing Taxi company’s to buy into.
Force people to spend X00,000$/car to enter a market and then let ride-shares ignore that requirement that’s going to push all these companies to bankruptcy simply because the newcomers don’t have to pay interest on these loans.
There’s always a trade off between “cost” and everything else. If you’re wealthy enough they cost doesn’t really matter to you, regulation is fine because it leads to higher quality experiences in general.
But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
The problem is that without regulation there is little incentive for business to be honest about the quality of service you're getting. It becomes a race to the bottom as they charge premium prices for cut-rate quality. It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep and arrive late at night to a room that isn't what you expect. They just have to make their dispute process hard enough to keep customer money.
And if you day that's fraud, sure it is, but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
IMO regulation isn't perfect, but we should aim to fix it instead of throwing it out the window entirely
> It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep
I think this is actually how most people end up deciding to take their business elsewhere: they give a company their business once, are let down, and decide to never patronize that business or chain again. This is why customer recommendations and reviews hold weight at all -- they help give signal before your first business interaction.
> but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
I don't think almost anyone is in favor of no regulation, only the prescriptive step-by-step guideline regulations. If a hotel says "we have beds!" and then they don't have beds, that's a very different regulatory case than a hotel saying "our bed are comfortable!" and then their beds are not comfortable.
> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
And perhaps saving money might be even more valuable to you than <what you wrote above, but every "or" being progressively replaced with an "and">!
> Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
Yes, but that "one point on a trade off curve for everyone" works as a backstop against inevitable slide downwards. If globalization of trade and e-commerce taught us anything, reputation systems are trivially gamed, most branding exists primarily to fool people who still think it means something into spending more for less.
Even without talking about potential fraud, market competition naturally turns into race to the bottom. Regulation is what sets that bottom higher than "absolute worst possible before the market segment self-destructs".
There are many different levels of hotel rooms. But, as with many things, service worker labor has gotten more expensive relative to other things (Baumol cost disease basically). So it makes sense for hotels and other industries to automate or simply eliminate things like daily room cleanings that most customers don't actually value a lot.
Pretty sure some airbnbs don’t even clean between guests. I’ve had some iffy experiences, and because of the consistently issues, it’s why I prefer hotels now unless there’s no other option.
Without knowing what sort of information sharing exists among hotels, I'd suspect that AirBnB has a much stronger reputation signal that can be relied upon, which should disincentivize and blacklist people who are trashing places or causing pest problems.
With Airbnb you're on the hook for cleaning costs..at a hotel the assumption is the hotel will clean up your mess (as long as it's not extreme or unreasonable)
Hotels are certainly charging the guests for cleaning up; it is just not broken out as a separate charge. Of course, Airbnb’s do not have the economies of scale that a hotel has and in some cases for short term rentals charge more for the cleaning than the rented space. I stay with the pros and avoid Airbnb’s for both cost and convenience reasons.
>Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate.
'Should be' yes, but you'd be surprised how many don't follow through on this, and not necessarily due to lack of policy. Cleaning staff have very tight schedules, being allocated only a few minutes to completely clean and setup the room for the new guest but if the old guest didn't follow through on the exact checkout time, then that throws of the schedule of the cleaning staff completely, meaning they often cut corners to meet their deadlines.
This is undoubtedly true, but I don't think it affects the main point. Doing less room-cleaning (or charging more for each time it happens) doesn't mean inter-guest cleaning is affected.
Even if there is some food lying around in a room on the 3rd floor, the cockroaches and rats won't just materialize out of thin air. Unless the hygienic conditions are generally bad anyway, but then the hotel has a bigger problem than one dirty room...
> the cockroaches and rats won't just materialize out of thin air
In practice, you can assume they do - it's a simplified but accurate model of reality when you're not researching the life of insects and rodents.
Yes, life does not appear "out of thin air", but it constantly tries to get in, will exploit any crack in your defenses or attention to chase after anything that looks or smells like food or safety. It's simpler to just assume annoying critters materialize out of thin air if you leave the right conditions, and ensure those conditions are never present.
It's kind of like thermodynamics / statistical physics: the air around you doesn't really have "pressure" or "temperature", but you may just as well assume they're a thing, since the alternative would be to talk about kinematics of air molecules.
We had a mouse problem once. The ended up being a small hole drilled in the side of the house to install a cat5 cable for a security camera. The hole couldn't have been more than 1.5 cm in diameter, and it had a cat 5 cable running through it - but apparently this was enough space for a mouse to squeeze through.
All you need are some outside cats roaming the spacious yard to discourage the small cute furry little rodents from “cozying” up in your house. When living in an urban dwelling with 50 other families, other strategies are needed.
Yeah; we've had mouse problems in our 90-ish-year-old house ever since we moved in a decade+ ago. Then in the winter of 2019-20, a cat started sheltering in our garage on a regular basis.
We had no mouse problems that winter, and very few since then.
I once heard that nowhere on Earth you're ever more than 6 meters away from a rat. I don't think that's true, but it's probably still a bad idea to blindly assume that there's no vermin anywhere. You keep vermin away by not feeding them.
> owhere on Earth you're ever more than 6 meters away from a rat. I don't think that's true
I see that as realistic, if we are talking 2D spaces. In urban environments, they live in sewers, and you have sewers under every building. In the countryside, they obviously live everywhere.
I can see that 6-metres rule broken only if going 3D, i.e. in multi-storey buildings with spotless maintenance of any nook and cranny, living on the third or fourth floor, you might be a bit further away than that.
It's probably not worth it just to avoid the rats, but Antartica is rat-free. (Other extremely cold places are likely to be as well, at least enough to make the 6-meter distance.)
I recently made a bad choice in hotel and ended up at a fairly dodgy looking place, most of the lights in the room didn’t function and the shower didn’t work properly, but it was spotlessly clean so I accepted the mistake.
No, it means that when housekeeping fails to clean a room, for whatever reason, he can't rent it out.
The people losing their minds and screaming at him is what happens when something else that isn't quite to their satisfaction happens. Like, say, the hotel requiring a deposit and a major credit card and ID to book a room.
