Hotel etiquette globally

The moment

It is 6:10 am in a hotel in Lisbon. A door down the corridor shuts with a bang. A suitcase gets dragged, not wheeled, over a tiled threshold. Two voices work out whether the taxi is booked, at the volume of a station platform. You are awake now, and so is everyone on the floor. Two days later you have the early flight, and you are the one in the corridor.

What's actually happening

A hotel looks like a public building and behaves like a block of bedrooms. Thirty strangers sleep along one corridor with a light door between them and you. In a lot of Indian hotels the corridor doubles as social space, and at a wedding block that is exactly right. On an ordinary weekday abroad, the corridor is a hallway inside somebody's house.

The room works on the same misreading. It looks like a shop, so it feels like everything in it is on offer. Actually the room splits cleanly into two lists. There are consumables, which are costed per stay and meant to leave with you. There is inventory, which is costed per room and meant to stay.

Behind both is a person whose workload the research measures directly. In a survey of 941 room cleaners at unionised Las Vegas hotels, 63% reported severe low back pain in the previous month. Pain tracked strongly with work intensification. That study also found hotel workers' injury rates running above the national service sector average.

What works better

Three rules, and none of them cost you anything.

Rule 1: Corridor volume is bedroom volume. From 10 pm to 8 am, close doors with your hand rather than letting them swing. Wheel the suitcase, do not drag it. Take the call downstairs.

Rule 2: Consumables go, inventory stays. Soap, shampoo, slippers, the sewing kit, the stationery: yours, and the hotel has already priced them. Towels, robes, hangers, the kettle, the remote, the art: not yours. If you liked the robe, most chains sell one.

Rule 3: Do not smoke indoors. Marriott has been smoke-free across its United States and Canada properties since 2006. It charges what it calls a significant room recovery fee for guests who do not comply. Marriott also says the policy is optional at its international properties. So the rule you met in Chicago may not be the rule in Lisbon. Ask, and treat the balcony as indoors until told otherwise.

Why it matters

None of this is about being a tidy person. It is about the fact that a hotel is the one space abroad where nobody is watching you, and the effects still land on somebody.

The corridor at 6 am costs a stranger an hour of sleep they cannot get back. The towel left on the floor is a machine wash nobody needed. The room left as a puzzle costs minutes from a shift already measured in minutes. It is done by someone whose back is the most likely part of them to be hurting.

Try this next time

Do the two-minute sweep before you check out. Wet towels onto the rail or into the tub. Rubbish into the bin, cups and plates onto the tray. Curtains open, safe emptied, nothing shoved under the bed.

That is it. Not spotless, just findable. Be the guest whose room takes the normal thirty minutes instead of forty.