The UX of hotel rooms: 11 anti-patterns

I spend more time than most in hotels. At a rough estimate over the past four years I’ve spent 20 months staying in around 85 different hotels, serviced apartments or Airbnbs.

This has given me a sharp appreciation of the simple pleasure of living in an actual flat with rooms and a kitchen, but also an insight into how businesses find themselves designing their product based on what their peers are doing and not the needs of their customers.

Here I present 11 hotel horrors that need to get in the interior design bin.

1) Accent cushions and throws

The user need: There isn’t one

The reality: A number of cushions on the bed, plus a strip of fabric serving no discernible purpose other than to tie the colour scheme of the room together. And which you should never touch. A basic rule here is: the thicker the fabric, the less frequently these are cleaned; it’s highly likely they contain traces of body fluid from tens - if not hundreds - of people.

User action: Don the gloves, strip the whole monstrosity off the bed and lob into the corner. Add guilt when you reflect on how the cleaning team will feel.

2) Toiletries

The user need: The basics - shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, toothpaste - so you can go to bed with clean teeth, then shower in the morning. You’d think this was obvious.

The reality: Three bottles which are really all shower gel. Shoe shine kit (?!). Shower cap. No toothpaste.

User action: Get in shower, realise you don’t have the toiletries, grab the closest one and scream in anger that it’s conditioner. It always is.

Side note: If you’re an international traveller, your toiletries are often in a plastic bag. Hotel teams, please know this, do not empty this bag and don’t throw it away. I will kill you.

3) Overly public bathrooms

The user need: Bring daylight into a windowless room to increase the feeling of space and improve visibility in mirrors. Kitting out rooms for romantic couples in first throes of a relationship staring at the other taking a bath before a long evening of passionate lovemaking.

Admirable. In theory.

The reality: Over the past 10 years or so there’s been a trend towards the glass-walled bathroom to facilitate the above. But making the bath/shower visible from the bed - ok if a couple, a bit awkward if sharing with a friend - also puts the loo square into view. However much certain corners of the internet may disagree, nothing says “the romance is gone” more than taking a dump in front of your partner.

This hotel design pattern is a relationship killer and it has to stop.

4) Hairdryers

The user need: People have three main reasons for staying in hotels. 1) they are working in a different location from their main home; 2) they are on holiday; 3) they are visiting someone or attending an event such as a wedding. In all three use cases, people have a need to look their best, and for most that means having clean, dry and styled hair.

The reality: Sadly, hotels seem to overlook this and instead provide an sad blow-dryer wired into the wall in the bathroom. This fails on two counts:

1. Efficacy: Not all dryers are created equal. My hairdryer of choice (the Parlux 3800) allows me to tame my barnet in around seven minutes. Those provided by hotels are barely any better than sticking your head under a hand dryer; that’s 20 minutes lost every single day trying to make myself presentable
2. Placement: Adding insult to injury, these appliances are wired into the wall, often in positions that make no sense - such as away from the nearest mirror, forcing one to ‘guessdry’ one’s hair.

5) Plugs

User need: To keep the myriad devices one travels with charged up

The reality: Power provision has not kept pace with device proliferation. At one hotel I stayed in recently I had three USB hubs plugged into each other, sticking out of a single socket like a kind of ‘power centipede’.

6) Alarm clock

The user need: Getting up on time in the morning

The reality: No sane human being would choose to fiddle with an unfamiliar alarm clock to ensure they’re up in time for work/wedding. Everyone uses their phone as an alarm clock.

Please throw these away. And use the space to provide a power socket near the bed (see above)

7) Lights!

The user need: Sufficient, variable lighting for tasks such as working at a desk, checking one’s appearance, reading in bed, and so on

The reality: For the love of God, who designed the lights and the light switch locations in hotel rooms? Every check in, I spend minutes flicking switches and watching for signs of life in the lights. It’s like safe cracking. And you’re the kind of soul who should go put their life savings on red if you manage to work out the order of the lights to use to enable to you to get into bed and switch off the last light near your head.

One stay, in a Geneva hotel, the designer had added a number of Philips Hue LED colour strips so that I could “choose a colour to reflect my mood”. My mood was “raging furious red” as I struggled (and failed) to find the switch for the lighting around the base of the bed. In the end, I had to pull it from the plug.

And while we’re at it, “bed base lighting” is just not a good idea. I’m not a porn star.

8) Irons and ironing boards

The user need: If you’re a man, and you’re travelling for work, you have shirts that probably need ironing. To do this properly, I need a board that’s big, an iron that actually gets hot and, critically, is clean and stays clean.

The reality: Both iron and board absent. Never, ever, not ever do I want to hear the words “ironing room at the end of the corridor” or “we’ll pop an iron to your room when one becomes available”

Or, worse, there is an iron but replete with a mysterious black substance that becomes ironed on to one’s clean white shirt. The minimum I ask is for the kind of iron you’d have in your own house.

10) Curtains that don’t cover the windows fully

User need: Darkness when I need to sleep; light when it’s time to wake

The reality: Drapes that stop 2cm short of the edge of the window, letting in a slither of light that is slow torture to the jetlagged traveller as they stare at the ceiling hoping for the sweet embrace of death.

11) Showers that unavoidably get floors wet

The user need: A bathroom floor that shouldn’t require a ‘Caution: floor slippery’ sign or a visit to A&E.

The reality: Water. Everywhere. Are the wet towels from guests - every day - no clue to you that the bathroom doesn’t function properly? It’s beyond me why cleaning staff don’t report these issues to engineering teams. It would save so much guilt, time, energy, water, heat…

There’s a simple solution to this: design around what people actually need. Try asking some people who stay at hotels. Then let’s gather those accent cushions into a giant pile and burn the lot.

(thanks to Jonathan Phillips for input on this. Writing this has been cathartic for us both).