Should You Stay In Your Hotel Room While It’s Being Cleaned?

Speaking to HuffPost UK previously, etiquette expert and author William Hanson, who paired with Hotels.com to create a Grand Etiquette Hotel guide, shared the worst way to treat hotel staff.

“The height of rudeness is treating staff as though they are invisible, or worse, beneath you,” he shared with us.

“Snapping fingers, avoiding eye contact, or issuing demands without a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ is quite beyond the pale”.

Hanson explained that includes leaving your room in a “reasonable” state for cleaning staff when you finish your stay. But what’s the etiquette when you’re still in there?

Here, we asked him whether we should vacate the area when it’s due a clean.

The etiquette expert’s answer was pretty definitive: “You should vacate the room while it is being serviced. It is simply more considerate”.

He added, “Most housekeepers will wait until you are out and will always knock and announce themselves first.

“If you are inside and would like the room cleaned, answer promptly, greet
them politely, and make your exit. Linger not.”

And, Hanson stressed, it’s important to leave your room in decent nick throughout your stay, rather than just rushing through it at the end.

“As I note in Rule Five of my Grand Etiquette Hotel Guide… ‘Housekeeping Is Not an Archaeological Activity.’ They are there to clean, not excavate,” he stated.

Yes – Hanson has a “golden rule” when it comes to hotel staff.

“If you wouldn’t speak that way to a colleague, don’t do so in a hotel simply because you are paying to be there. Good manners, one finds, are often quietly rewarded,” he said.

A hotel etiquette study commissioned by Hotels.com found that 90% of Brits think our hotel manners are pretty perfect.

But the same research also found that over a third of us have tried to sneak in an extra guest after booking, and about the same amount say they’ve snuck out breakfast buffet food to eat later.