I once stayed at a very boutiquey, avant-garde hotel with a platonic friend. We had booked a twin room with separate beds, but what I did not expect was that the shower cubicle, with clear glass on all three sides, would be placed between the beds.
In London's Shard, the gent's toilets of the observation deck (on approx the 70th floor) have glass walls behind the urinals so if you look straight ahead while using them it is as if you are peeing on the city of London from a great height.
The old Warner stand at Lord's cricket ground used to be where the press watched from (before the new Media Centre was built). The urinals in old stand used to have windows above them looking out over the pitch so that the journalists wouldn't miss anything whilst they urinated.
I always enjoy a "loo with a view", including that one at the Shard. I also enjoyed the outdoor one I utilized in Botswana that had the toilet isolated from camp behind a small wooden fence, but while sitting on the throne you are facing out from a slight elevation onto a sweeping 180 degree view of the savanna, with antelopes, giraffes, and elephants roaming around.
The W in Santiago, Chile, has a full-length floor-to-ceiling glass window in the shower, with the morning sun shining right in. Your other option is a bathtub set in the middle of the bedroom itself. Mercifully the WC has a door.
Pretty sure I went to a bar in NYC that still had a urinal trough running directly below the bar as you were standing there... so one wouldn't need to leave the bar to take a leak. This was 30 years ago. McSorleys maybe?
"Back in my day," Lake Helen (~10,000 ft) on Mt. Shasta had a pit toilet without walls that faced the valley. Depending on the weather, it could even be above the clouds/fog and IIRC on a clear day you could see the ocean.
There's a hotel in Edinburgh with boutique pretensions I stayed in that had smoked glass (only) around the toilet. That was a pretty annoying arrangement for me and my wife. Luckily they had regular loos in reception.
In between the beds?? Does that mean the shower was right in the middle of the room ? So that it would be impossible to place a double bed ? This is the weirdest part to me
The world makes full circle. A 4-toilet (2 facing the other 2 for lively conversation) bathroom per floor, no walls whatsoever between the toilets, "open layout" so to speak, in our dormitory in high school (regional school for advanced science studies) in USSR in 80-ies come to mind. Looks like we were living the boutiquey avant-garde way of the future :)
Seeing it was advanced science, authorities wanted to add venues to encourage constant communication and collaboration. Always working for the people and the state! No time wasted.
This is similar to the arrangements of public toilets in ancient Rome, except for them the seats are arrangemed in a circle.
Everything old is new again.
Sounds like the various RAF bases I did stints at as a cadet - the ablutions were just a great big room full of loos, showers, and bathtubs, all with dark brown water, and absolutely zero privacy of any variety.
The exposed loos were a novelty for me, at school we at least had shoulder height partitions - but we had communal showers and baths so it wasn’t a huge leap.
I also spent a year or so living in a studio where the loo was in the kitchen area - we at least installed a curtain.
I've only really encountered glass walls for the shower room in Asia, and in almost every case there's been a curtain that could be drawn across the glass if required.
Huh.. I've stayed in over 1,000 hotels and Airbnbs over the last 15 years and not once saw a bathroom with no door. Lots of bathroom windows, but always some kind of door.
I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.
Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.
I've seen this. Sometimes, they have curtains. I don't really understand what the point is though. It's definitely not price. I would imagine that it's costlier to add a window to a wall than just to brick it. I thought it was to allow one to watch the TV while taking a shower or a bath. It's the most reasonable thing I could come up with.
In Hyperion, the character Martin Silenus is rich enough that he lives in a novelty palace where all the rooms are connected by teleporters. As a joke, the bathroom is a wallless raft on an ocean world.
Outside of the realm of science fiction, my sister followed a TV show for a while that was basically a set of advertisements for a modular home company. One episode featured the installation of a small home on a remote British island; the shower was a pipe outside the house itself.
This erosion of privacy is being taken to extremes.
One of my short stories takes place in a not-to-distant future, where there is absolutely no privacy. In one chapter a child goes to a bathroom in an old building, and he sees that there is not only a door, but there is a contraption on it. A lock! The child runs out of the bathroom in fright. The audience learns only a little later that the child is frightened about what human-eating animals might stalk prey in that area, that anybody would ever think to lock themselves in there.
Yes! I was just recently traveling for work in a decent hotel but not a suite, just one with two queen beds but by myself. It had a glass barn door and the top half was frosted glass with "painted" glass on the bottom. Irritating but at least it was just me.
The worst aspect of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport was the sliding bathroom door. Almost everything else about the place was really great but the bathroom door wae 1/2" from the face of the wall and bounced off the end of the slider track.
I recently stayed at a hotel in San Francisco that had no bathroom door. I'd even upgraded to the queen size room specifically because their layout map showed a door while the smaller rooms did not. I was pretty annoyed by that. (Edit: Despite being a single traveller. I think doors are important for hygiene).
I've been in hotels with no bathroom door, but it has pretty much always been in tiny one-person rooms, where realistically there are not going to be two people in the room because they _would not fit_. I don't have a particular problem with it there.
(In that case, the reason it's done is fairly clearly that to accommodate a door they'd have to make the room bigger.)
Me neither, but I remember that when searching for hotels and Airbnbs, I only filter for hotels that are 8+/10 domestically and 9+/10 internationally, which filters out many of the hotels that have those kinds of issues (and score doesn't affect budget much).
Booking.com has this grade inflation issue. if something is shit but you rate everything else fairly (things like location, staff friendliness, etc), the final score will be 7 or 8.. in summary: I had a lousy experience, 7/10!
It takes some experience to realize that a place graded 7.x probably has serious issues.
Wow I've only stayed in about 100 but have seen several.
There are several variations:
- bathrooms with glass walls but with (glass) door
- bathrooms with walls but without door
- bathrooms with partially open walls, sometimes even with door :P
The worst was when I was once sharing a room with my daughter and the bathroom was one with glass walls and no shower curtain.
We decided to schedule our toilet visits and showers so the other one would not be in the room.
I've stayed in probably 15 hotels in the US in the past 15 years and at least one of them had either no bathroom door, or a glass door, or a bathroom door and a shower that had a glass door.
My sister shared with me a home listing that had a bedroom and basically a toilet in a closet, and no door — just a curtain for privacy. That was weird.
I run into this barn door style decently often at run of the mill Marriotts and Hiltons across the US. It seems like the chances are higher the newer the construction.
I've seen it at cheap hotels (EasyHotel and similar) but generally only in tiny single-person rooms (of the "single bed and just enough space to walk past it to the bathroom, which is the size of an airplane toilet" variety), where it's basically _fine_.
The weirdest one I stayed at so far was a hotel with tiny rooms in central London which had the upper half of the wall separating the bathroom made out of the kind of glass that becomes opaque with electricity. The switch to control that was outside of the bathroom, of course.
And I don't even travel that much, around once a year on average.
Post-Sheraton acquisition, I find the Marriott branding can be a bit random. Still stay in them a lot, but I've had a couple of relatively mediocre Aloft stays of late.
Uhh, Aloft is in Marriott's "Select" bucket along with Fairfield and Courtyard. They have some shiny touches that let them claim the "Distinctive" label, but are basically just motels.
I see it all the time. I actually don’t have an issue with it though. I’m usually alone in the room, or with my family and we all know that we poop. Not that we don’t respect privacy but when circumstance arise, we can bunk together in close quarters without it being super weird.
Yes, not one. I just googled for pictures of hotel bathrooms without doors out of curiosity and mostly see sliding and frosted glass doors. Is that what people are talking about?
While we’re at it, bring back shower doors/curtains. It’s such a pain having this huge puddle outside the shower just because they decided it shouldn’t have one. It’s not so common to be missing one in US hotels, but it’s common internationally.
Edit: apparently the virus has spread, and some US hotels now don’t have them
I was talking about this with my wife the other day: Newer hotel showers are "Hostile Architecture" disguised as modern design. They add those little annoying details with the intention of lowering their water bill. They want showering to be slightly discomfort, so you shower faster without noticing. It's a feature, not a bug.
Some years ago I stayed in a hotel outside London, and they apparently had a policy of saving as much as possible on soap bars.. so they used some horrible high-pH soap, very cheap looking. But it was nearly impossible to rinse it off.. took me fifteen minutes of hot water usage after I was, or should have been done with the shower. Whatever they saved in soap they lost many times over in water and even more in energy use.
And in a tourist place on an island farther south the room had an information binder which also asked that you shouldn't waste water as there weren't many natural resources for water there. However, the hot water came from the far end of the narrow, rectangular-shaped long hotel, and the pipes were outside and weren't insulated, they were completely bare. Whenever you turned off the hot water for a few minutes it would take some five minutes to get it back, water running, as the pipes got cold right away (there are many other usages for hot water than just using the shower - the rooms had kitchens). So of course all the guests used many times more water than they would have needed, not to mention the wasted heat. Totally baffling.
A more widespread piece of hostile hotel shower architecture is unlabelled controls. You need trial and error to work out which way is more water, and more heat.
I first thought this is nonsense, but then it made a lot sense. It might be an exception to the rule "never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity."
Denmark loves their 'wet' bathrooms in hotels, no shower door and a drain in the center of the room. I spent a lot of time in CPH and would stay at the Marriott because it was one of the few with American style bathrooms.
> Denmark loves their 'wet' bathrooms in hotels, no shower door and a drain in the center of the room.
If you're renting an apartment in Shanghai, a cheap one will have a door to the bathroom, but the shower won't be a separate fixture. The entire bathroom functions as the shower (the hose or fixed piping is mounted on a wall), and there's a drain in the floor.
A more recent apartment will have a shower installation that is, say, separate from the toilet.
I’ve never understood this - it’s maddening. I grew up in the US and the bare minimum was always at least a shower curtain (inner and outer), and if not that, a proper door.
Why on earth did this half-pane of glass become standard in so many places. It’s completely ineffective and ends up with water everywhere.
My shower in Denmark has no door, and no curtain, but the splashes don't reach very far away, and aren't in the way of anywhere I'd want to walk after showering anyway.
I've often seen hotel bathrooms in other countries that get this wrong. In the worst case, splashed water from the open shower runs all across the bathroom, and in one case (a Grand Hyatt!) into the main room carpet.
The half pane of glass is appropriate in warm parts of the world where you want the heat to be removed as quickly as possible. I suspect some hotel executive thought it looked cool in Miami, then made it the standard for the whole chain.
i hate it when the set up the half-pane in such a way that you can't adjust the water temp/pressure without being directly under the shower head.
when dealing with a new set of shower controls, i like to stand to the side and figure out what's happening and whether i need to let it warm up rather than stepping into the firing lane and taking whatever it throws at me
Every single place I’ve stayed in Europe had no shower door, and nothing to prevent the water from spilling out. Occasionally I get lucky and the floor is constructed sufficiently concave so at least the water flows into the drain
it has become unfortunately common in marriott hotels in the (western) US, specifically the current generation of residence inn; and i think i've seen it in new towneplace suites as well. it's entirely a form over function decision: you end up with cool air wafting in while you shower, and you end up with a wet bathroom floor (including a soaked floormat).
the same hotels have a kitchen sink tap which has hot/cold selected on the vertical axis, with no indication of which direction is hot/cold.
This is one reason I'm staying at more Hilton hotels than Marriott brands these days. Having a wet bathroom floor is high on my list of pet peeves, enough so that I'll abandon lifetime elite status with Marriott to stay at hotels with doors on the showers.
That's an overly broad generalization. Shower curtains are pretty common in Norway, and I've found them in hotels all over Europe and even one in Japan.
I assume curtains are just far more labor to keep clean? They build up soap scum on a daily basis, and you can't just quickly wipe them down like tile or glass. A glass shower door just feels so much more hygienic.
But I'm with you about the confusion around showers that don't even have a door. Never seen that in the US. But abroad, I truly don't get it.
But before that, for the love of god, solve the automatic slamming door problem. I understand we need heavy doors for fire safety but please implement soft close with dampers.
The hotel industry is bizarre. I feel like we hit this maxima circa 2005 where prefabrication made for the shockingly cheap/nice Hampton Inn style hotels in the US.
Now those places anre on the wrong side of the depreciation curve, and every chain hotel is a little worse every day. They bill upfront since COVID, don’t clean the room, shrink the towels and deliver a shittier level of service. I was at a Marriott recently where the room had no linens - no towels, sheets, pillows, nothing.
I called and was instructed to do everything myself, and the hotel GM’s attitude was that “shit happens”.
I've traveled more recently for a new job and the downgrade in hotels has been the same. I've stayed at a la quinta that was no better than a motel 6 with a barely cleaned room and towels that were more like old wash cloths, a Marriot down the road from raven's stadium in Baltimore that had the stupid open shower thing and room stank like mold, and the surprising belle of the ball has been a best western "plus" which has essentially been what a midrange Hilton/Marriot was just a few years ago.
I did. They told me to go pound it and talk to the GM. I ended up getting 15,000 points.
I probably have ~100 hotel nights a year, that’s only happened once. But the experience is dramatically worse since Covid. They used it as an excuse and then re-baselined the service. Worse product, worse services, higher prices.
Wait.. there are hotels which don't have a door on the bathroom? I have literally never seen that. Is this degeneracy uncommon in the US or have I just gotten lucky?
It's becoming trendy, so people book larger suites instead and also so the hotels can save money on doors and easier for housekeeping. They're getting rid of shower doors too.
I stayed at a super fancy hotel in Napa for a work event that didn't even have a WALL separating off the bathroom it was just a half-partition sheer panel thing.
I watched this and it doesn't seem like anti-patterns to me? I spend more time in hotels than most and ironing boards, closets, minibars, and "bigger rooms" are not things I care about. I don't hang out in the room; it's a box I enter to shower and sleep.
A younger, lone traveller staying 2-3 nights is probably going to be out doing things in the day, and in the evening. And they won't have much luggage either.
Elderly travellers might not have the same level of energy; they might prefer to spend a few hours quietly relaxing with a book. And they might want an armchair per person, rather than sitting on the bed to read.
Business travellers might need somewhere to set up a laptop and work from, power, decent internet connectivity, and someplace they can iron some shirts.
Longer-term travellers (e.g. someone visiting a city to supervise like the building of a warehouse) will have more luggage, and they'll want to make themselves a bit more at home - they won't be out on the town every night for a month. They're more likely to use the hotel gym.
For some people, holidays are all about relaxing and doing things at a leisurely pace. Perhaps they want to spend the morning sitting on a balcony reading the newspaper - if you have a balcony.
For couples on honeymoon, they might want a nice room with a great bed.
Families might have two children and two adults sharing a room, with the children going to bed earlier and the adults sorta hanging out nearby; in this market, the hotel room sofa might fold out into two beds suitable for under-10s.
And of course, if you want to target all of these markets at the same time you end up with the classic cluttered hotel room with wardrobe, desk, desk chair, armchair, bedside tables, reading lamp, ironing board, TV, etc etc etc
I don't hang out in my hotel rooms either, but an iron, ironing board, and closet with hangars help me not look like a slob when I want to put on some nice clothes and go out for the evening.
Things I want, Socket next to bed, light switch next to bed, decent mattress and pillow, blackout blinds, no noise from next door/corridor
I do like a good shower too, rather than those stupid bath things like it’s the 1980s, and get rid of American hotels which seem to be allergic to providing shower gel
When I use to travel for work, I exclusively stayed in Embassy Suites because it didn’t feel like a shoebox and it gave me space to decompress after a full day of active like I like people.
Even now that I work remotely, my wife and I might spend a week back home in Atlanta where our adult children and friends live. We “live” in the hotel like we live at home. I’m usually working during the day, she might hang out with other friends who don’t work during the day and we plan things at night.
It’s really nice to have the space of a Hyatt House/Homewood Suites.
Even when we go on vacation we don’t have a jam packed scheduled where we have to be doing something every minute.
A toilet door is a basic no brainer. Unless you want any others to watch or - if travelling alone - you want your bedroom area to smell the same as your freshly shat-in toilet...
But then hotel do dumb things like fully enclose a barfridge in a cupboard too.
It’s also a hygiene issue. Bathrooms are notoriously covered in fecal particles, one of the reason why flushing with the lid up is not a great idea. Having a door at least provides some protection against your bed also being covered in them.
Hotel beds are covered in far worse, a few more floating poo particles coming round the corner from the loo (after all, even if there is a door, it isn't always closed by prior guests, and they may get into bed without washing hands or worse) is the least of your worries.
When I stayed in the Dubai airport hotel not only was it $550 a night for a basic tiny room and there were there no bathroom doors but there was a GIANT painting of the king of dubai both in the bathroom and the bedroom! The one in the bedroom was almost floor to ceiling size. I hung a towel over him. It was super creepy and felt like his eyes were watching you as you walked around the room.
In The Good Soldier Svejk, the tavern keeper Pavilec is arrested for taking down his portrait of Emperor Franz Josef, because the flies were shitting on it.
> Section Two: Crimes and Penalties; 2. Slander, challenge, or insult the Divine Essence:
> Anyone who commits one of the acts stipulated in Clauses (2, 3, and 5) of Article (4) of this Decree by Law, by any means of expression or other forms or by using any means, shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of not less than one year and a fine of not less than (AED 250,000) two hundred and fifty thousand UAE Dirhams and not exceeding (AED 1,000,000) one million UAE Dirhams, or by one of these two penalties.
While this is obviously grotesque, it's both funny, sad and telling that the overarching name for the legislation is Federal Law by Decree Concerning Combating Discrimination, Hatred and Extremism. UAE learned this from the US/Europe.
It's not about saving a few bucks on a door. It's about discouraging you and your friends from sharing a single room. Hotel sees the money they're leaving on the table and will trade you for it for the low price of watching your buddies do their business.
"Staying in a hotel with a romantic partner and/or family" is at least as primary a use case for hotels as "staying in a hotel with a platonic friend" and is still a scenario where you want a door but is NOT a scenario where "just get separate rooms" is a logical conclusion. "Get the hell out of that hotel and complain about it to everyone you know," on the other hand, is.
The much more specific way to target platonic buddies/coworkers from sharing a room would be eliminating rooms with two beds since the "couple" scenario would generally be perfectly happy with that still.
Also even in the single person case I want to have the bathroom door closed when I take a shower because it keeps the heat in. Which is why I also dislike (most of) the barn door style doors. I can't be the only one that likes to step out of the shower and into a nice and steamy room. Like what, you want to step out and be cold? That's masochistic.
Not to mention no door doesn't bother me with another person because I can easily avoid "seeing them do their business" by being in the main room. I've never been in a hotel room where the bathroom door faces the beds. It's always in the hall just after entering the room. I'm sure there's exceptions but that's the standard setup.
Quick tip I discovered when traveling with my teenage daughter: a lot of hotel sites are now unclear on whether a booking is for a room with one or two beds. I found that listing "occupants" as 3 would usually force such sites to sort for rooms with two beds (even though there would only be two of us). Assuming there's no breakfast included, the price is usually the same for 2 or 3.
How do you complain and go to another hotel if every single hotel is owned by four companies that are colluding together to do the same thing. This ignores the very obvious fact that you may not want to search for a hotel at 2AM in a strange city when you are exhausted. Keep making excuses for your masters though, this is the world you live in.
Marriot,Hilton,IGT,Hyatt own almost all hotels in any area you want to go to.
In what way would it discourage you and your friend(s) from booking a standard twin room, if they don't tell you there's no bathroom door?
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
Here are the options:
1. You offer double, twin and single rooms. Friends book twin rooms.
2. You offer only double and single rooms, in the hope that non-romantically engaged pairs of people will book two single rooms. Friends book some other hotel's twin rooms.
3. You offer double, twin and single rooms and you tell people before booking there's no toilet door. Friends book some other hotel's twin rooms.
4. You offer double, twin and single rooms but surprise! there are no toilet doors. Friends who've booked a twin room either demand a cancellation immediately upon seeing the room, demand a room with a toilet door, or they demand you offer some kind of ersatz privacy screen, and no matter what you do they're going to rain fury on every review site they can think of, tanking your reputation.
In which of these situations does the hotel get extra money?
> In what way would it discourage you and your friend(s) from booking a standard twin room, if they don't tell you there's no bathroom door?
(They regard it as cheapskating/cheating.)
Very simple: by making it the status quo that bathroom doors aren't there they discourage you to rent a single room. So instead, you rent two single rooms with full privacy for each of you. Because a double room is only for couples, in their (I concur: twisted) world.
You mean you want to go to the competition? What if the competition does it as well? What if it is the norm?
As for your #4. People don't have time to put effort into such. Outliers do, they're the ones who make noisy drama at the reception. But they're the exception, not the rule.
But how would you know until it's too late and you've already checked in? Doesn't seem to be a very effective way of achieving this... Just means my mate and I wouldn't go back to that hotel again.
How would not having doors prevent people from sharing a room, unless it was highlighted prominently on the website? If that was the case, this person wouldn’t be making a website to catalog this information.
By making it enough of a nuisance such that the next time you book a hotel, any hotel, for 2 platonic friends you are strongly nudged to book two separate rooms.
It sometimes feels like hotels are taunting us: "we're behaving like a cartel, whaddaya gonna do? Regulate us!? We've already tricked you into thinking that's socialism!"
I honestly think it's more about "things that look better on instagram" that has infected virtually every hospitality related experience I've had in the last few years. A room that photographs well or a meal that looks ridiculous are more important than a room that's actually comfortable or a meal that tastes good.
The logical conclusion here would be to have no door for the bathroom, but to have specifically the toilet in a separate subroom.
But I don’t think this makes much sense anyways. The hotel industry is not one that thrives from repeat patronage, and “the bathroom has no doors” features rarely in marketing.
Not sure how uncommon that is. Certainly a sink is often in an open alcove. The toilet and probably often the shower is in a subroom with a door.
Not sure how common sharing a room with a work colleague--especially of the opposite sex--or a family member who is a teen is. But traveling with friends, activity partners (hiking, etc.), so much of what's being discussed on this thread just isn't a real issue in my experience at least in most Western culture.
Oh wow, I actually never realized this was the motivation. I thought there was just a hotel convention somewhere and they decided bathroom doors don't look good on social media so they're not gonna do them anymore.
Of course, you could just upgrade to a suite, at three times the price. Hey where are you going? btw the minibar water is only $7 but if you prepay, you can get it discounted to $6! for a bottle of water!
One way to get hotels to bring back the bathroom doors and other amenities from yesteryear is through cultural warfare of sorts. When all your customers consider and talk off these not as hotel rooms but cheap motel rooms or even brothel rooms:) Hotels aren't going to like it and eventually it'll catch up with them.
With the rise in AIRBNB and other similar competing services I expected hotels to compete back by lowering costs and improving conditions. Was I wrong, oh boy..
I applaud this effort. Now I wish someone would do one for hotels where the shower controls seem designed for maximum confusion. I'm pretty sure there are conventions for hotel shower designers where they compete to make showers that spray you with freezing or scalding water or simply make it impossible for water to come out at all, while the controls look maximally pretty.
More than 200 hotels already on this website. Wouldn't this be much more useful as an OpenStreetMap tag so people can find and share these good/bad hotels in whatever front-end they like?
There does not seem to be a tag for it yet. That there are apparently hundreds of instances, and it being definitely something you'd want to select for, makes me think it's a good fit for OSM. Currently, hotels can already have tags like phone number, reception opening hours, WiFi fees, etc. It might even be a good fit for the toilets:* namespace, since this has overlap with toilets in (semi-)public spaces offering different levels of privacy
The list doesn't seem to be accurate. I looked at a few and found zero evidence of missing bathroom doors in reviews or photos. One even had a review complaining the bathroom door was broken and not closing fully... indicating it is actually there.
The website has no open data license so this isn't usable for OSM, even if we wanted to. I just meant to propose collaborating on an existing platform where we already have a lot of data about physical features, rather than erecting an ephemeral platform for this special purpose
This trend is the absolute bane of early-stage startups.
When you are bootstrapping and flying a team to a conference, sharing twin rooms is standard procedure to stretch the runway. There is nothing that kills the vibe of a "strategic roadmap discussion" faster than realizing you have zero acoustic privacy from your co-founder using the toilet 3 feet away.
It feels like hostile architecture specifically designed to break the "business frugality" use case. We ended up switching to Airbnbs solely because of this.
Single people or couples don't want doorless bathrooms, but they will probably tolerate them if forced into a room with that setup. Other types of travelers might not be so open-minded, and that's the point that OP is arguing about. Provide the bare minimum tolerable experience to your target audience and punish the customers you don't want.
I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.
> I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
Right?
My wife and I don't use the toilet in front of each other. Even when we lived in an apartment with only 1 bathroom. You gotta use the toilet while one is showering? You can hold it.
Even when I'm home alone and don't expect her to come home any time soon, I close the door. I just feel so exposed with the door open. Even when I lived alone, I'm pretty sure I would close the door.
Whether the room has a door on the bathroom or not, business travellers should be getting separate rooms... Over dozens of trips, the only time I've ever shared was a two-bedroom apartment when I went with a colleague for a conference (one had an ensuite so we had separate bathrooms as well as separate bedrooms with doors).
I wouldn't be OK with going on trips (or sending people I manage on trips) where two people had to sleep in the same room, I wouldn't consider that acceptable...
20 years ago a shared room was kinda the go-to for conferences and business meetings seemed like at companies I worked at. It was normal to share a 2 bed room with another guy, but all the hotels we ever stayed at had a bathroom with door that closed and didn't open straight to the bedroom. It also had a curtain or at least a frosted door if someone happened to open the door.
No, it is because doors take up a lot of space. A typical door is 3 feet wide, and requires 7-14 feet of empty space to operate [0]. You can't place any furniture, toiletries, or luggage racks in this space. For a typical hotel room of 300sq feet, this "dead space" represents 3-5% of the room. Removing the door allows hotels to decrease the size of each room, and fit more rooms on each floor, increasing profit.
This is why many newer hotels choose to sliding doors, which barely take up any space, or just remove doors entirely.
[0] For a door of r=3 feet, A door swings a minimum of 90 degrees, which takes 3.14 * 3*2 / 4 = 7.065 sq feet at a minimum to 14.1 sq feet to operate.
Only once have I seen anything like this. The room had a bathroom door, but also a giant hole cut out in the wall so that everyone in the room could peer into the bathroom for some reason. We demanded a different room with a complete wall separating the bathroom and got one (a nicer one at their expense too).
In my view, a hotel's primary function is to provide a comfortable bathroom and a comfortable night's sleep. Both should be simple. If is has failed in either, it has failed as a hotel altogether.
I now need extra wide space in the bathroom, so before booking I always check images on hotel-booking web sites, read reviews and look up video reviews of the hotel on YouTube.
There are surprisingly many video reviews of hotel rooms out there.
Videos can also sometimes reveal whether a hotel bathroom has a particularly noisy fan, which is important to avoid for sleep.
The weirdest hotel bathroom I've encountered was in a top-floor suite. It had a door, but... multiple toilet seats and showers with no individual doors in-between them, nor to the multiple washbasins. There was no shortage of space for doors or partitions.
This is a huge theme (for lack of a better word) in Bangkok... I have seen countless condos with glass box bathrooms. My wife and I love each other deeply but we have 0 desire to make eye contact while pooping. Our daughter is another case but we both hope she will grow out of it.
At least in the US, the design choice of barn door or no door might also be driven by ADA compliance. You have to provide a lot of space to meet all the accessibility requirements and a hinged door can make the minimum square footage much higher than you’d think.
This reminds me of the last time I was in Vegas for DEF CON and we booked rooms in this dimly-lit hotel that had surprisingly bright bathrooms with a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the shower. A similar mirror hung outside in the room on the wall opposite.
Yes, it was a one-way mirror looking in. A number of people who had booked rooms together had an exercise kicking their roommate out of the room to take showers that week.
It would be a good idea to put some eye-catching example of a hotel room in the article headline, like an image of a shower without a door, just for visual impact.
As for me, I’ve come across hotels where the shower is visible from the bedroom, separated only by a glass wall. Lol, that’s probably the next level.
I've seen it in the US in smaller dense urban rooms and it's honestly something I've never thought about.
It's honestly something it would never occur to me to write a blog post about. But I guess it's one of those things that some people are sensitive about.
Basically, just like the airlines, the hotels are saying if you are such a broke destitute to be able to upgrade to our premium tier, then go suffer in the smell of your own shit.
I’m glad that someone has built this and made it their personal crusade, but this is a problem that I can’t relate to having. I find it far more uncomfortable/intimate to sleep next to someone (even if in separate beds) than to shower or use the toilet in front off someone. Snoring, farting, dream talking, morning erections, etc.
Somehow I seem to be in the minority with this opinion. But if we’re sharing a room we’re probably pretty comfortable with each other.
I've never seen this. But I'm kind of the opposite. When it comes to hotel rooms, I prefer function over form. A lot of hotels cover up their lack of quality with a lot of crap that serves no purpose whatsoever. Generic art reproductions on the wall. A lot of shiny chrome or bronze. A fancy looking shower that produces a luke warm mediocre flow of water that than splatters all over the bath room, etc. Or, worse, a dingy looking bath that you have to awkwardly step into and a shower head that will point anywhere except at you unless you hold it. I've seen it all. US hotels tend to be the worst on this front. It's all form over function and the amount of nonsense goes up with the number of stars.
What I want is:
- clean, comfortable bed. Preferably without pubic hairs from the previous occupant (which is what happens if the hotel cuts corners on servicing the rooms).
- a simple but functional shower with hot water
- enough toilet paper. I don't care about anyone folding the first sheet over. Who does that at home? Absolutely no-one I know.
- Power plugs next to the bed so I can charge my phone and use it while I'm on it.
- A window that can open and an AC with an off button.
- Wifi that works just like at home and doesn't kick me out every morning because some cookie expired.
- Bonus points if I don't get to listen in on the TV next door.
What I've found in some expensive premium hotels is the exact opposite of all of the above. Stuffy warm rooms. Barely functional plumbing. Windows that cannot open "for my safety", ACs that are producing noise and bad air 24x7 that are turned off at night to save energy. But the light fixtures are beautiful. And there are 20x more pillows and blankets on the bed than I need.
Some of the best hotels I've had were very affordable budget affairs aimed at return customers that are like me. Basically good management and pragmatic decoration is all you need to turn a mediocre room into a very comfortable one.
Have had some where the shower is just glass panels for the room to see (and no, it wasn't that kind of hotel).
Another hotel in a small town here in Germany where it had shutter-style doors and where the roof of the bathroom didn't go all the way to the actual ceiling, so you can hear everything.
I stayed at one in Iceland where the entire bathroom wall facing the living room was unfrosted glass, including the door. The living room was open concept so it was hard to avoid seeing into the bathroom. Great place for couples to bring their entire selves to the relationship.
Glass box bathrooms are common in lower end Chinese hotels. So they don’t really have a door, and you are separated from the rest of the room by a glass pane. Weird, but not the worst I’ve experienced. The worst is when the shower straddles the squat toilet.
I really prefer bathrooms with a separate door for the separate toilet from the rest of it. And the shower has to be a walk in, but bathtubs are really only common in North America outside of higher end resorts that have both a separate walk in shower and a bathtub.
Perhaps I say at all the wrong (right?) hotels but... I stay in close to two dozen North American hotels a year and I haven't noticed this trend? Many have pocket doors but I can't think of a hotel in recent memory that was missing it completely. I usually partially close them so it's not as cold getting out of a shower so I hope I would have taken note if it wasn't there.
Recently I stayed in the Korean hotel where the toilet and the bathroom had the door but made out of semi transparent glass. And the worst, the toilet was next to the glass and walls while on the opposite side was bed. Perfect view and the smell my friend
If someone cares about this so much to make a website, why not include an explanation? There's mention of dignity. I don't feel my dignity lessened when my bathroom has no door. Perhaps the door is useful to keep the heat and the steam inside the bathroom?
If you only stay in hotels alone, it probables doesn’t matter that much to you. Quite apart from questions of dignity, when sharing a hotel room, there are practical conveniences: it’s nice to keep odors contained, and to be able to turn on the bathroom light at night without waking anyone up.
My first no-bathroom door hotel experience was 2017 in a hotel in Vientiane. We were so baffled we asked, and they proudly explained that this was a "European bathroom". It was literally set up so that you had full view of the room (and vice versa) when taking a shit.
Simple action for those who are unhappy with this situation (and a suggestion for this website creator/ owner): hotels appear to be linked to their booking.com listing. Take a few minutes to select some hotels from the list (possibly at random), then go to their Booking.com page, search for reviews mentioning the lack of a bathroom door, and mark them as helpful. The website could agevolate this process by providing a list of direct link to booking.com pages of the offending hotels.
I've recently stayed at a new Holiday Inn Express near NYC. It had a proper bathroom, nothing to complain about. But there was no ventilation at all. There was this American-style air conditioner under the window and some small outlet in the bathroom, but I couldn't force the air conditioner to force-intake air. It's either super-noisy with compressor running or completely off. I absolutely don't understand how it is even possible that room has no ventilation.
Not to mention these modern showers that have a slab of glass on the 1st 3rd but then open door for the rest such that water leaks all over the place. Looks great on insta but sucks at being a shower.
I had not been at hotels with bathroom without a door, but I would want them to have a door like the people who wrote the article allegedly do. What I could do without is a TV set and many other things, but I would want to have a door, and a desk, and fresh air.
I wonder if this is because hotels are in a race to seem "cool" and "edgy." Will this trend get to the point where they cut a hole on the middle of the mattress and tell you to just lie down and shit right there?
I think it would be more effective if the site was analyzing existing reviews - and encouraging people to leave scathing reviews where a hotel decides that bathroom doors are optional.
A standalone web site isn't going to make it into the hotel's metrics, "the most driver of sub-9/10 ratings is the lack of bathroom doors" will make them find a way to reinstall them pronto.
I noticed in East Asia, they also have some tendency to have floor to ceiling windows through the whole bathroom to the bedroom, sometimes with no curtain either. I am not sure who this is for
The legend is that if you invite a lady for the night, it's so you and she can keep an eye on each other, in case either is worried about one going through their stuff/wallet while the other is in the bathroom.
I stayed in such a hotel, and getting up to go the bathroom I noticed someone had flicked a business-card-sized advertisement under the door, for said companionship...
>’m done. I’m done arriving at hotels and discovering that they have removed the bathroom door. Something that should be as standard as having a bed, has been sacrificed in the name of “aesthetic”.
In what country or region are we here? I've never seen a bathroom without a door in a hotel.
Ok so it's not just me. I keep staying in hotels where there's a bathroom door, but it's partially see-through. Clearly they were ok spending the money for a door but decided they don't want to give privacy. Didn't bother me, but it stuck out.
I am a frequent traveller(literally have the star alliance card).
Although I’ve never stayed in a hotel without bathroom doors, they frequently have sliding doors which don’t seal properly. So that’s the first thing I look out for nowadays.
I agree bathroom doors are sensible when traveling with company. When staying alone, though, I prefer no doors. If there is a door, I tend to use a small piece of gaffers' tape to hold it open. I don't spend a lot of time in the hotel room, so while I'm in there I want my movement unimpeded.
The worst I've experienced was a sliding barn door which covered either the bathroom or the clothes rack. If I wanted my clothes to breathe, I had to shut the bathroom with a door that only impedes movement and does not provide privacy. If I wanted to move around freely, I had to shut my clothes in!
I usually stay 50+ nights/year at hotels all across the value spectrum and haven't thought about this until now! Proper bathroom doors _are_ hard to come by.
Just returned from Malaga in Spain. The EasyHotel we stayed in had frosted glass cubicle for the toilet and shower. But there were huge gaps in between. Haha!
Joking aside, I find this far more in newer European hotels for whatever reason (though I'm sure it exists stateside and elsewhere too). My wife and I at this point just agree to tell each other when we're going to occupy it because we don't feel like it getting weird. Feels like - if the conspiracy-ish theory of it being used to dissuade people sharing rooms is true - they're inadvertently throwing out the couples dynamic.
To borrow another Seinfeld bit: there's good naked and bad naked. The glass door problem invites the latter.
I get the point, but myself have no intention of ever sharing a hotel room with anyone I am not comfortable to concurrently use a bathroom with, i.e. my gf/wife. I would much rather see an initiative to show me if a hotel shower has a proper way to keep the water in, so I do not have to use three towels to provide some sort of spot where I can properly dry off whilst not standing ankle deep in water. Never understood why this is the case in so many hotels, it does nt seem to aid cleaning staff either. That, and a proper filter for on premises parking (not the "public parking is plentiful around the hotel" in the fine print bs), and for wifi, show me the speedtest results please.
Zoning does a lot of weird things. My zoning laws require me to put immediate hot water at every faucet. there is no code requiring it. There is zero safety issue.
My state does not require a door on a guest bathroom in a hotel. A bathroom serving employees and the public in a hotel is required to have a self-closing door, but the law does not say anything about doors on guest only bathrooms.
I couldn’t find anything in the International Building Code about bathroom doors aside from minimum opening width, but I don’t have access to the full code. I’d have to ask an architect or GC to verify.
> 4625.1200 TOILET REQUIREMENTS.
> Every hotel, motel, and lodging house shall be equipped with adequate and conveniently located water closets for the accommodation of its employees and guests. Water closets, lavatories, and bathtubs or showers shall be available on each floor when not provided in each individual room. Toilet, lavatory, and bath facilities shall be provided in the ratio of one toilet and one lavatory for every ten occupants, or fraction thereof, and one bathtub or shower for every 20 occupants, or fraction thereof. Toilet rooms shall be well ventilated by natural or mechanical methods. The doors of all toilet rooms serving the public and employees shall be self-closing. Toilets and bathrooms shall be kept clean and in good repair and shall be well lighted and ventilated. Hand-washing signs shall be posted in each toilet room used by employees. Every resort shall be equipped with adequate and convenient toilet facilities for its employees and guests. If privies are provided they shall be separate buildings and shall be constructed, equipped, and maintained in conformity with the standards of the commissioner and shall be kept clean.
Forget the bathroom doors; can we at least bring back proper shower stall design that uses full-length doors instead of the 1/3-length piece of glass? More glaringly, those of you who know the Hilton MUC for instance, it's utterly mind blowing what they've done: the shower stall floor is on the same plane as the rest of the bathroom floor -- i.e., it's not sunken at all -- and it's not sloped or otherwise angled, either, to prevent water from seeping under the door and flood the whole floor. And this isn't like one-off bug in one room: we've stayed their countless times, in different rooms, and every single one suffers this problem.
To me that design screams it is a love hotel primarily used for one night stands and those beds you've slept on have been used for various such reasons. There isn't much dignity to be had after that.
Only slightly relevant, but at the Porsche dealership in Odesa, Ukraine, their bathroom has two toilets together in the one open space, with a chessboard on a plinth between them. The Ukrainians are very funny. I can share a photo if anyone's interested.
I have long standardised the way I do hotel reviews:
- bullshit wifi connectivity (e.g. captive wifi + OTP)?
- normal wifi but with very long password?
- is there a place to put toiletries in the shower?
- clean?
- time to check in and check out?
Where I travel the hotels without bathroom doors have not proliferated yet. I've been in a few, even when I am alone I hate the experience.
Just when you think you’ve seen all the corporate/business fuckery in this world. I already ask stuff like — is it a non-smoking room or not, do not use a strong room freshener when prepping the room (or better save money and skip freshener), etc. Now do I have to ask — whether your room has a bathroom door or not? Fucking hell! Hopefully, such fucked-up trends don’t reach this corner of the world at the speed and efficiency with which COVID did.
For the rest of the world: it seems way more common in the US/americas to share rooms than it is elsewhere.
Rooms with two queen-sized beds sitting next to each other are pretty standard, even in mid and high range hotels, while I’ve never seen those elsewhere.
So yeah people share these rooms as it’s usually quite cheaper than getting two rooms. I did it with friends and my in laws.
It seems like the target hotel customer for fancy hotels is an Instagram model or a Kardashian. I get having a sliding door to the bathroom or translucent walls on the shower is annoying but the status symbols in hotels are not designed for your average hacker News poster. They're trying to make a small room in an older building look like a bigger room to justify the price.
One of my favourite hotels in SE Asia has this problem. (I won't name and shame, since when we complained they said it's going to be fixed soon in a redesign.)
On the topic, though... I want a desk that isn't made of glass so that I can use a mouse. Optical mice have been the standard for years, and of course I don't carry a mousepad. Who thinks glass desktops are good?
That would be weird and uncomfortable traveling with a kid. Is it geographic or is this madness taking over the world? Seems like something that would get a place destroyed in reviews and lose them business.
My personal "travel hack" for a while now is to poo in communal facilities that hardly ever seem to be in use in any hotel I've stayed in. I don't understand why anyone wants to poo a metre from their bed, regardless of a door.
As for showering, I don't really care to be honest. I'm cleaning my naked body. It's not some super secret affair that nobody is allowed to see.
Having said that I've yet to encounter a hotel where the toilet/shower isn't private.
What I really care about when travelling is being able to sleep which means the correct noise level and temperature. Far too many hotel rooms are simply too warm. Who the hell can sleep at 23 degrees with gigantic fluffy duvets designed for Nordic countries and no fan/airflow?
I've thought about making a similar site for this issue before but, ultimately, I don't travel anywhere near enough for it to be worth it. These days I just assume travelling will be shit sleep, and if it isn't then it's a bonus.
Not sure if they have gotten dimmer. Possibly the opposite: I don't remember having noticed it recently (but I've also travelled a lot less), but I do remember being very annoyed by this many years ago.
No idea why hotels were doing it, neither LEDs nor the electricity for them are that expensive and I doubt anyone wants to be stuck in a dark cave.
This is done, presumably, so people dont buddy up to save money on rooms. They'll be too shy or modest. So if its 4 people traveling, say 2 couples, they'll rent two rooms instead of one.
Anecdotal, but this reminded me of when I attended a conference in las vegas, booked two to a room, and unbeknownst to us or the booking agency, the hotel had a large window between the shower and the sleeping area that had no kind of shade or cover at all. It was extremely awkward - ultimately I and the other occupant agreed on being out of the room when the other showered.
This site showed me a few links, like booking.com. Booking.com took 40 seconds to load with all its weird JavaScript, popups, and blocks. Is this the norm to have extremely heavy sites like this?
Any hotel room without a bathroom door has been repeatedly blasted with fecal air covering all surfaces some order of magnitude more than rooms with a door
It's not a function of price. One of the most expensive hotels in Southeast Asia has this problem. I've complained. They said they're fixing it in an upcoming design refresh.
I once stayed at a very boutiquey, avant-garde hotel with a platonic friend. We had booked a twin room with separate beds, but what I did not expect was that the shower cubicle, with clear glass on all three sides, would be placed between the beds.
In London's Shard, the gent's toilets of the observation deck (on approx the 70th floor) have glass walls behind the urinals so if you look straight ahead while using them it is as if you are peeing on the city of London from a great height.
The old Warner stand at Lord's cricket ground used to be where the press watched from (before the new Media Centre was built). The urinals in old stand used to have windows above them looking out over the pitch so that the journalists wouldn't miss anything whilst they urinated.
Image: https://d3rcx32iafnn0o.cloudfront.net/Pictures/980x653fitpad...
The three square windows under the second tier, just below where the sportingbet.com and Jaguar advertising boards meet.
I always enjoy a "loo with a view", including that one at the Shard. I also enjoyed the outdoor one I utilized in Botswana that had the toilet isolated from camp behind a small wooden fence, but while sitting on the throne you are facing out from a slight elevation onto a sweeping 180 degree view of the savanna, with antelopes, giraffes, and elephants roaming around.
The W in Santiago, Chile, has a full-length floor-to-ceiling glass window in the shower, with the morning sun shining right in. Your other option is a bathtub set in the middle of the bedroom itself. Mercifully the WC has a door.
Pretty sure I went to a bar in NYC that still had a urinal trough running directly below the bar as you were standing there... so one wouldn't need to leave the bar to take a leak. This was 30 years ago. McSorleys maybe?
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"Back in my day," Lake Helen (~10,000 ft) on Mt. Shasta had a pit toilet without walls that faced the valley. Depending on the weather, it could even be above the clouds/fog and IIRC on a clear day you could see the ocean.
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Not the Platonic ideal of a hotel room
No, but I bet the shower was a decent approximation of a Platonic solid.
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Such an odd decision. No privacy or isolation for the shower, but yes for the two twin beds. Sleep apart but shower together.
My SO and I move and snore, not a bad arrangement. Somehow I don't think that's what they were going for though.
It builds tension
There's a hotel in Edinburgh with boutique pretensions I stayed in that had smoked glass (only) around the toilet. That was a pretty annoying arrangement for me and my wife. Luckily they had regular loos in reception.
was it a travelodge? with that smoked glass bathrom being right behind the bed?
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In between the beds?? Does that mean the shower was right in the middle of the room ? So that it would be impossible to place a double bed ? This is the weirdest part to me
That's how platonic friendships usually end.
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder..
It's called foreplay. Jk.
I've seen a glass shower where the glass turned to smoked opaque glass with the push of a button. Maybe this shower had something similar?
But this is no excuse, still completely awkward and horrible design.
The world makes full circle. A 4-toilet (2 facing the other 2 for lively conversation) bathroom per floor, no walls whatsoever between the toilets, "open layout" so to speak, in our dormitory in high school (regional school for advanced science studies) in USSR in 80-ies come to mind. Looks like we were living the boutiquey avant-garde way of the future :)
Seeing it was advanced science, authorities wanted to add venues to encourage constant communication and collaboration. Always working for the people and the state! No time wasted.
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This is similar to the arrangements of public toilets in ancient Rome, except for them the seats are arrangemed in a circle. Everything old is new again.
Sounds like the various RAF bases I did stints at as a cadet - the ablutions were just a great big room full of loos, showers, and bathtubs, all with dark brown water, and absolutely zero privacy of any variety.
The exposed loos were a novelty for me, at school we at least had shoulder height partitions - but we had communal showers and baths so it wasn’t a huge leap.
I also spent a year or so living in a studio where the loo was in the kitchen area - we at least installed a curtain.
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They had built some of those for the Olympics in Sochi, if memory serves.. :-)
> 80-ies
eighty...ies? eightieies? why not just "80s"?
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Had two toilets in my flat only parted with a thin wood wall. Better talking with another one that is shitting than playing on the smartphone.
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I went looking for pictures (someone must have shared this on internet ...). This is the closes I could find https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/if6ahf/the_sh...
In my high school the toilet stalls had no doors and the walls were only about waist high brick walls. Horrific
I've only really encountered glass walls for the shower room in Asia, and in almost every case there's been a curtain that could be drawn across the glass if required.
Please tell my that you have pictures of this to show!
Wouldn’t be very platonic to take pictures.
Was it a "love hotel" because...that doesn't sound like a regular hotel?
That bathroom layout has become extremely common in normal hotels in parts of Asia and the Middle East.
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Huh.. I've stayed in over 1,000 hotels and Airbnbs over the last 15 years and not once saw a bathroom with no door. Lots of bathroom windows, but always some kind of door.
Was it made of glass?
I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.
Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.
I've seen this. Sometimes, they have curtains. I don't really understand what the point is though. It's definitely not price. I would imagine that it's costlier to add a window to a wall than just to brick it. I thought it was to allow one to watch the TV while taking a shower or a bath. It's the most reasonable thing I could come up with.
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Review and vote with your wallet and your feet
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In Hyperion, the character Martin Silenus is rich enough that he lives in a novelty palace where all the rooms are connected by teleporters. As a joke, the bathroom is a wallless raft on an ocean world.
Outside of the realm of science fiction, my sister followed a TV show for a while that was basically a set of advertisements for a modular home company. One episode featured the installation of a small home on a remote British island; the shower was a pipe outside the house itself.
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A lot of them are becoming barn style sliding doors, with large gaps. So if you’re making some noise, everyone will hear you.
This erosion of privacy is being taken to extremes.
One of my short stories takes place in a not-to-distant future, where there is absolutely no privacy. In one chapter a child goes to a bathroom in an old building, and he sees that there is not only a door, but there is a contraption on it. A lock! The child runs out of the bathroom in fright. The audience learns only a little later that the child is frightened about what human-eating animals might stalk prey in that area, that anybody would ever think to lock themselves in there.
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Yes! I was just recently traveling for work in a decent hotel but not a suite, just one with two queen beds but by myself. It had a glass barn door and the top half was frosted glass with "painted" glass on the bottom. Irritating but at least it was just me.
The worst aspect of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport was the sliding bathroom door. Almost everything else about the place was really great but the bathroom door wae 1/2" from the face of the wall and bounced off the end of the slider track.
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Lowes hotels at Universal Orlando has them. Worse is they sometimes just slide open on their own.
People make noise when they piss and shit. It’s not scandalous.
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I recently stayed at a hotel in San Francisco that had no bathroom door. I'd even upgraded to the queen size room specifically because their layout map showed a door while the smaller rooms did not. I was pretty annoyed by that. (Edit: Despite being a single traveller. I think doors are important for hygiene).
Happy to see someone is trying to fix this trend.
How are doors important for hygiene?
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I've been in hotels with no bathroom door, but it has pretty much always been in tiny one-person rooms, where realistically there are not going to be two people in the room because they _would not fit_. I don't have a particular problem with it there.
(In that case, the reason it's done is fairly clearly that to accommodate a door they'd have to make the room bigger.)
To be honest, those are the rooms that I hope would have a bathroom door so that you don't end up with water everywhere outside the bathroom.
Me neither, but I remember that when searching for hotels and Airbnbs, I only filter for hotels that are 8+/10 domestically and 9+/10 internationally, which filters out many of the hotels that have those kinds of issues (and score doesn't affect budget much).
Booking.com has this grade inflation issue. if something is shit but you rate everything else fairly (things like location, staff friendliness, etc), the final score will be 7 or 8.. in summary: I had a lousy experience, 7/10!
It takes some experience to realize that a place graded 7.x probably has serious issues.
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Wow I've only stayed in about 100 but have seen several. There are several variations:
- bathrooms with glass walls but with (glass) door
- bathrooms with walls but without door
- bathrooms with partially open walls, sometimes even with door :P
The worst was when I was once sharing a room with my daughter and the bathroom was one with glass walls and no shower curtain. We decided to schedule our toilet visits and showers so the other one would not be in the room.
I've stayed in probably 15 hotels in the US in the past 15 years and at least one of them had either no bathroom door, or a glass door, or a bathroom door and a shower that had a glass door.
My sister shared with me a home listing that had a bedroom and basically a toilet in a closet, and no door — just a curtain for privacy. That was weird.
Reading this thread, it seems like it's a trend with very fancy hotels?
I usually stay at chain hotels and this is never really a problem.
I run into this barn door style decently often at run of the mill Marriotts and Hiltons across the US. It seems like the chances are higher the newer the construction.
I've seen it at cheap hotels (EasyHotel and similar) but generally only in tiny single-person rooms (of the "single bed and just enough space to walk past it to the bathroom, which is the size of an airplane toilet" variety), where it's basically _fine_.
The weirdest one I stayed at so far was a hotel with tiny rooms in central London which had the upper half of the wall separating the bathroom made out of the kind of glass that becomes opaque with electricity. The switch to control that was outside of the bathroom, of course.
And I don't even travel that much, around once a year on average.
You've never seen a sliding door rather than a fully closing one? That's one of the types of doors that the author is complaining about
The author of TFA doesn’t really mention sliders at all - just harps on about “no doors”.
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Ah yes, quite a few. Not great, but definitely better than literally no door.
ALoft London Excel hotel. Fancy as hell, no bathroom doors.
You shit behind your bed, I kid you not
Well that explains why I've never seen this trend.
I stick to rooms with two digits in front of the decimal.
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Post-Sheraton acquisition, I find the Marriott branding can be a bit random. Still stay in them a lot, but I've had a couple of relatively mediocre Aloft stays of late.
Uhh, Aloft is in Marriott's "Select" bucket along with Fairfield and Courtyard. They have some shiny touches that let them claim the "Distinctive" label, but are basically just motels.
https://www.hotel-development.marriott.com/brands
$200+ a night and it doesn't come with a bathroom door?
This is why I just stay home.
Ditto. I've never seen this before. They always have at least those sliding doors.
The author of the site considers sliding doors not a real door
The last 3 JW Marriotts had open shower rooms connected to bedroom, no door, just a curtain [1].
[1]: https://www.google.com/travel/hotels/Houston%2C%20TX/entity/...
I see it all the time. I actually don’t have an issue with it though. I’m usually alone in the room, or with my family and we all know that we poop. Not that we don’t respect privacy but when circumstance arise, we can bunk together in close quarters without it being super weird.
I'm currently in a room with frosted glass for the shower and bathroom, with my girlfriend and her daughter. I guess it helps with lighting?
Really? I stayed in far fewer and maybe 10% have no doors. And then another 30% have no locks or doors that don’t close all the way (barn doors)
Yes, not one. I just googled for pictures of hotel bathrooms without doors out of curiosity and mostly see sliding and frosted glass doors. Is that what people are talking about?
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While we’re at it, bring back shower doors/curtains. It’s such a pain having this huge puddle outside the shower just because they decided it shouldn’t have one. It’s not so common to be missing one in US hotels, but it’s common internationally.
Edit: apparently the virus has spread, and some US hotels now don’t have them
I was talking about this with my wife the other day: Newer hotel showers are "Hostile Architecture" disguised as modern design. They add those little annoying details with the intention of lowering their water bill. They want showering to be slightly discomfort, so you shower faster without noticing. It's a feature, not a bug.
Some years ago I stayed in a hotel outside London, and they apparently had a policy of saving as much as possible on soap bars.. so they used some horrible high-pH soap, very cheap looking. But it was nearly impossible to rinse it off.. took me fifteen minutes of hot water usage after I was, or should have been done with the shower. Whatever they saved in soap they lost many times over in water and even more in energy use.
And in a tourist place on an island farther south the room had an information binder which also asked that you shouldn't waste water as there weren't many natural resources for water there. However, the hot water came from the far end of the narrow, rectangular-shaped long hotel, and the pipes were outside and weren't insulated, they were completely bare. Whenever you turned off the hot water for a few minutes it would take some five minutes to get it back, water running, as the pipes got cold right away (there are many other usages for hot water than just using the shower - the rooms had kitchens). So of course all the guests used many times more water than they would have needed, not to mention the wasted heat. Totally baffling.
Also they probably save on cleaning costs.
A more widespread piece of hostile hotel shower architecture is unlabelled controls. You need trial and error to work out which way is more water, and more heat.
I first thought this is nonsense, but then it made a lot sense. It might be an exception to the rule "never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity."
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Denmark loves their 'wet' bathrooms in hotels, no shower door and a drain in the center of the room. I spent a lot of time in CPH and would stay at the Marriott because it was one of the few with American style bathrooms.
Europeans are good at building a lot of things, but I will never understand the "cosplay a small flood" style bathrooms.
It's just... inefficient? Why wouldn't we want to catch the water closest to where it comes out?
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The drain should be within the shower area, with all the bathroom floor draining that way.
If it's in the centre of the room it's been done very badly. I've never seen this in Denmark, even in some very old apartment buildings.
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> Denmark loves their 'wet' bathrooms in hotels, no shower door and a drain in the center of the room.
If you're renting an apartment in Shanghai, a cheap one will have a door to the bathroom, but the shower won't be a separate fixture. The entire bathroom functions as the shower (the hose or fixed piping is mounted on a wall), and there's a drain in the floor.
A more recent apartment will have a shower installation that is, say, separate from the toilet.
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I’ve never understood this - it’s maddening. I grew up in the US and the bare minimum was always at least a shower curtain (inner and outer), and if not that, a proper door.
Why on earth did this half-pane of glass become standard in so many places. It’s completely ineffective and ends up with water everywhere.
The bathroom needs to be destined properly.
My shower in Denmark has no door, and no curtain, but the splashes don't reach very far away, and aren't in the way of anywhere I'd want to walk after showering anyway.
I've often seen hotel bathrooms in other countries that get this wrong. In the worst case, splashed water from the open shower runs all across the bathroom, and in one case (a Grand Hyatt!) into the main room carpet.
Did the designers not know water flows down?
The half pane of glass is appropriate in warm parts of the world where you want the heat to be removed as quickly as possible. I suspect some hotel executive thought it looked cool in Miami, then made it the standard for the whole chain.
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i hate it when the set up the half-pane in such a way that you can't adjust the water temp/pressure without being directly under the shower head.
when dealing with a new set of shower controls, i like to stand to the side and figure out what's happening and whether i need to let it warm up rather than stepping into the firing lane and taking whatever it throws at me
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Every single place I’ve stayed in Europe had no shower door, and nothing to prevent the water from spilling out. Occasionally I get lucky and the floor is constructed sufficiently concave so at least the water flows into the drain
it has become unfortunately common in marriott hotels in the (western) US, specifically the current generation of residence inn; and i think i've seen it in new towneplace suites as well. it's entirely a form over function decision: you end up with cool air wafting in while you shower, and you end up with a wet bathroom floor (including a soaked floormat).
the same hotels have a kitchen sink tap which has hot/cold selected on the vertical axis, with no indication of which direction is hot/cold.
form over function. so annoying.
This is one reason I'm staying at more Hilton hotels than Marriott brands these days. Having a wet bathroom floor is high on my list of pet peeves, enough so that I'll abandon lifetime elite status with Marriott to stay at hotels with doors on the showers.
Shower curtains are very much a North American thing (well, US and Canada at least). It's a cultural difference you're seeing not a weird hotel trend.
That's an overly broad generalization. Shower curtains are pretty common in Norway, and I've found them in hotels all over Europe and even one in Japan.
I assume curtains are just far more labor to keep clean? They build up soap scum on a daily basis, and you can't just quickly wipe them down like tile or glass. A glass shower door just feels so much more hygienic.
But I'm with you about the confusion around showers that don't even have a door. Never seen that in the US. But abroad, I truly don't get it.
But before that, for the love of god, solve the automatic slamming door problem. I understand we need heavy doors for fire safety but please implement soft close with dampers.
The hotel industry is bizarre. I feel like we hit this maxima circa 2005 where prefabrication made for the shockingly cheap/nice Hampton Inn style hotels in the US.
Now those places anre on the wrong side of the depreciation curve, and every chain hotel is a little worse every day. They bill upfront since COVID, don’t clean the room, shrink the towels and deliver a shittier level of service. I was at a Marriott recently where the room had no linens - no towels, sheets, pillows, nothing.
I called and was instructed to do everything myself, and the hotel GM’s attitude was that “shit happens”.
I've traveled more recently for a new job and the downgrade in hotels has been the same. I've stayed at a la quinta that was no better than a motel 6 with a barely cleaned room and towels that were more like old wash cloths, a Marriot down the road from raven's stadium in Baltimore that had the stupid open shower thing and room stank like mold, and the surprising belle of the ball has been a best western "plus" which has essentially been what a midrange Hilton/Marriot was just a few years ago.
I’d assume that was a franchise hotel, and calling Marriott corporate would have got you some compensation at minimum.
I did. They told me to go pound it and talk to the GM. I ended up getting 15,000 points.
I probably have ~100 hotel nights a year, that’s only happened once. But the experience is dramatically worse since Covid. They used it as an excuse and then re-baselined the service. Worse product, worse services, higher prices.
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Yeah, I'm sure I've spent hundreds of nights in Marriott properties and never not had linens.
Wait.. there are hotels which don't have a door on the bathroom? I have literally never seen that. Is this degeneracy uncommon in the US or have I just gotten lucky?
It's becoming trendy, so people book larger suites instead and also so the hotels can save money on doors and easier for housekeeping. They're getting rid of shower doors too.
Nate Barzgate does a good bit on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgtgjA_UiAo
I stayed at a super fancy hotel in Napa for a work event that didn't even have a WALL separating off the bathroom it was just a half-partition sheer panel thing.
The author of the site considers sliding barn doors 'not real doors'
And right they are; sliding doors offer even less seal than the regular cheap doors usually used and as such less sound or odor protection.
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WSJ did a good explainer on hotel room design anti-patterns: https://youtu.be/116cwKs2XQs
Kendra Gaylord released a video on the topic yesterday too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFPGUTyo9Yk
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I watched this and it doesn't seem like anti-patterns to me? I spend more time in hotels than most and ironing boards, closets, minibars, and "bigger rooms" are not things I care about. I don't hang out in the room; it's a box I enter to shower and sleep.
It depends on the market you're aiming for.
A younger, lone traveller staying 2-3 nights is probably going to be out doing things in the day, and in the evening. And they won't have much luggage either.
Elderly travellers might not have the same level of energy; they might prefer to spend a few hours quietly relaxing with a book. And they might want an armchair per person, rather than sitting on the bed to read.
Business travellers might need somewhere to set up a laptop and work from, power, decent internet connectivity, and someplace they can iron some shirts.
Longer-term travellers (e.g. someone visiting a city to supervise like the building of a warehouse) will have more luggage, and they'll want to make themselves a bit more at home - they won't be out on the town every night for a month. They're more likely to use the hotel gym.
For some people, holidays are all about relaxing and doing things at a leisurely pace. Perhaps they want to spend the morning sitting on a balcony reading the newspaper - if you have a balcony.
For couples on honeymoon, they might want a nice room with a great bed.
Families might have two children and two adults sharing a room, with the children going to bed earlier and the adults sorta hanging out nearby; in this market, the hotel room sofa might fold out into two beds suitable for under-10s.
And of course, if you want to target all of these markets at the same time you end up with the classic cluttered hotel room with wardrobe, desk, desk chair, armchair, bedside tables, reading lamp, ironing board, TV, etc etc etc
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I don't hang out in my hotel rooms either, but an iron, ironing board, and closet with hangars help me not look like a slob when I want to put on some nice clothes and go out for the evening.
Things I want, Socket next to bed, light switch next to bed, decent mattress and pillow, blackout blinds, no noise from next door/corridor
I do like a good shower too, rather than those stupid bath things like it’s the 1980s, and get rid of American hotels which seem to be allergic to providing shower gel
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When I use to travel for work, I exclusively stayed in Embassy Suites because it didn’t feel like a shoebox and it gave me space to decompress after a full day of active like I like people.
Even now that I work remotely, my wife and I might spend a week back home in Atlanta where our adult children and friends live. We “live” in the hotel like we live at home. I’m usually working during the day, she might hang out with other friends who don’t work during the day and we plan things at night.
It’s really nice to have the space of a Hyatt House/Homewood Suites.
Even when we go on vacation we don’t have a jam packed scheduled where we have to be doing something every minute.
A toilet door is a basic no brainer. Unless you want any others to watch or - if travelling alone - you want your bedroom area to smell the same as your freshly shat-in toilet...
But then hotel do dumb things like fully enclose a barfridge in a cupboard too.
It’s also a hygiene issue. Bathrooms are notoriously covered in fecal particles, one of the reason why flushing with the lid up is not a great idea. Having a door at least provides some protection against your bed also being covered in them.
Hotel beds are covered in far worse, a few more floating poo particles coming round the corner from the loo (after all, even if there is a door, it isn't always closed by prior guests, and they may get into bed without washing hands or worse) is the least of your worries.
Fungus still everywhere though.
I hate to say it, but lowkey airflow is not stopped by doors.
There’s a big difference between a ocasional whiff and a massive stinker.
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Bathroom should have extractor fan. I havent smelt a shit outside of my home bathroom for this reason.
It probably is.
Door closed + extractor makes gaps have negative pressure, no way anything goes into the room.
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When I stayed in the Dubai airport hotel not only was it $550 a night for a basic tiny room and there were there no bathroom doors but there was a GIANT painting of the king of dubai both in the bathroom and the bedroom! The one in the bedroom was almost floor to ceiling size. I hung a towel over him. It was super creepy and felt like his eyes were watching you as you walked around the room.
Impossible to sex near that painting as the speaker will begin talking at you half way through!
"To sex" is to determine sex (gender.)
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> I hung a towel over him.
Be careful, that's probably a felony.
In The Good Soldier Svejk, the tavern keeper Pavilec is arrested for taking down his portrait of Emperor Franz Josef, because the flies were shitting on it.
Seems like it. Randy from Cupertino should probably avoid visiting UAE again.
https://uaelegislation.gov.ae/en/legislations/2131
> Section Two: Crimes and Penalties; 2. Slander, challenge, or insult the Divine Essence:
> Anyone who commits one of the acts stipulated in Clauses (2, 3, and 5) of Article (4) of this Decree by Law, by any means of expression or other forms or by using any means, shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of not less than one year and a fine of not less than (AED 250,000) two hundred and fifty thousand UAE Dirhams and not exceeding (AED 1,000,000) one million UAE Dirhams, or by one of these two penalties.
While this is obviously grotesque, it's both funny, sad and telling that the overarching name for the legislation is Federal Law by Decree Concerning Combating Discrimination, Hatred and Extremism. UAE learned this from the US/Europe.
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It's not about saving a few bucks on a door. It's about discouraging you and your friends from sharing a single room. Hotel sees the money they're leaving on the table and will trade you for it for the low price of watching your buddies do their business.
I don't think that adds up.
"Staying in a hotel with a romantic partner and/or family" is at least as primary a use case for hotels as "staying in a hotel with a platonic friend" and is still a scenario where you want a door but is NOT a scenario where "just get separate rooms" is a logical conclusion. "Get the hell out of that hotel and complain about it to everyone you know," on the other hand, is.
The much more specific way to target platonic buddies/coworkers from sharing a room would be eliminating rooms with two beds since the "couple" scenario would generally be perfectly happy with that still.
Also even in the single person case I want to have the bathroom door closed when I take a shower because it keeps the heat in. Which is why I also dislike (most of) the barn door style doors. I can't be the only one that likes to step out of the shower and into a nice and steamy room. Like what, you want to step out and be cold? That's masochistic.
Not to mention no door doesn't bother me with another person because I can easily avoid "seeing them do their business" by being in the main room. I've never been in a hotel room where the bathroom door faces the beds. It's always in the hall just after entering the room. I'm sure there's exceptions but that's the standard setup.
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> eliminating rooms with two beds
Quick tip I discovered when traveling with my teenage daughter: a lot of hotel sites are now unclear on whether a booking is for a room with one or two beds. I found that listing "occupants" as 3 would usually force such sites to sort for rooms with two beds (even though there would only be two of us). Assuming there's no breakfast included, the price is usually the same for 2 or 3.
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I think it’s at least partly right (few things are simple enough to have one cause).
A lot of businesses ask co-workers to share a room on trips. Business travel is a large share of reservations.
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How do you complain and go to another hotel if every single hotel is owned by four companies that are colluding together to do the same thing. This ignores the very obvious fact that you may not want to search for a hotel at 2AM in a strange city when you are exhausted. Keep making excuses for your masters though, this is the world you live in.
Marriot,Hilton,IGT,Hyatt own almost all hotels in any area you want to go to.
Enshittification is not just for apps anymore.
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This doesn't make any sense.
In what way would it discourage you and your friend(s) from booking a standard twin room, if they don't tell you there's no bathroom door?
Here are the options:
1. You offer double, twin and single rooms. Friends book twin rooms.
2. You offer only double and single rooms, in the hope that non-romantically engaged pairs of people will book two single rooms. Friends book some other hotel's twin rooms.
3. You offer double, twin and single rooms and you tell people before booking there's no toilet door. Friends book some other hotel's twin rooms.
4. You offer double, twin and single rooms but surprise! there are no toilet doors. Friends who've booked a twin room either demand a cancellation immediately upon seeing the room, demand a room with a toilet door, or they demand you offer some kind of ersatz privacy screen, and no matter what you do they're going to rain fury on every review site they can think of, tanking your reputation.
In which of these situations does the hotel get extra money?
> In what way would it discourage you and your friend(s) from booking a standard twin room, if they don't tell you there's no bathroom door?
(They regard it as cheapskating/cheating.)
Very simple: by making it the status quo that bathroom doors aren't there they discourage you to rent a single room. So instead, you rent two single rooms with full privacy for each of you. Because a double room is only for couples, in their (I concur: twisted) world.
You mean you want to go to the competition? What if the competition does it as well? What if it is the norm?
As for your #4. People don't have time to put effort into such. Outliers do, they're the ones who make noisy drama at the reception. But they're the exception, not the rule.
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Mr. President, we cannot allow a bathroom door gap!
But how would you know until it's too late and you've already checked in? Doesn't seem to be a very effective way of achieving this... Just means my mate and I wouldn't go back to that hotel again.
Ask forithe manager and tell them you want a different room or a refund.
For big chains, quirks like that become known.
...like, the building adjacent your La Quinta is a diner, period. "La Quinta, Spanish for 'next to Denny's'"
There are photos online and video tours of every hotel room on the planet. Check before booking.
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How would not having doors prevent people from sharing a room, unless it was highlighted prominently on the website? If that was the case, this person wouldn’t be making a website to catalog this information.
By making it enough of a nuisance such that the next time you book a hotel, any hotel, for 2 platonic friends you are strongly nudged to book two separate rooms.
It's far more likely to discourage me and my friends from staying at that hotel entirely.
How many people consider what a bathroom looks like before booking a hotel room? I can't say I've ever done so.
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It sometimes feels like hotels are taunting us: "we're behaving like a cartel, whaddaya gonna do? Regulate us!? We've already tricked you into thinking that's socialism!"
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Maybe, and also 100% guarantees I’ll never stay there with my family.
But do you check if the hotel has bathroom doors? If yes, where? You call up and ask? And trust the person on the phone is honest?
Most people would assume bathrooms have doors. It is just exhausting to have to check for every small, commonsensical, super basic detail
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New business idea... set up a truck with automated lockers on it next to the hotel and rent folding doors to the occupants for $20/night.
I honestly think it's more about "things that look better on instagram" that has infected virtually every hospitality related experience I've had in the last few years. A room that photographs well or a meal that looks ridiculous are more important than a room that's actually comfortable or a meal that tastes good.
The Standard in NYC has a straight up clear glass wall between the shower and the bed. Very sexy. Very not good for platonic friends sharing a room :)
I've seen that in some hotel rooms in China.
The logical conclusion here would be to have no door for the bathroom, but to have specifically the toilet in a separate subroom.
But I don’t think this makes much sense anyways. The hotel industry is not one that thrives from repeat patronage, and “the bathroom has no doors” features rarely in marketing.
Not sure how uncommon that is. Certainly a sink is often in an open alcove. The toilet and probably often the shower is in a subroom with a door.
Not sure how common sharing a room with a work colleague--especially of the opposite sex--or a family member who is a teen is. But traveling with friends, activity partners (hiking, etc.), so much of what's being discussed on this thread just isn't a real issue in my experience at least in most Western culture.
Oh wow, I actually never realized this was the motivation. I thought there was just a hotel convention somewhere and they decided bathroom doors don't look good on social media so they're not gonna do them anymore.
This makes much more sense.
How does a family of 3 or 4 use this room according to this logic?
Too bad, what have they done!!
Of course, you could just upgrade to a suite, at three times the price. Hey where are you going? btw the minibar water is only $7 but if you prepay, you can get it discounted to $6! for a bottle of water!
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One way to get hotels to bring back the bathroom doors and other amenities from yesteryear is through cultural warfare of sorts. When all your customers consider and talk off these not as hotel rooms but cheap motel rooms or even brothel rooms:) Hotels aren't going to like it and eventually it'll catch up with them.
With the rise in AIRBNB and other similar competing services I expected hotels to compete back by lowering costs and improving conditions. Was I wrong, oh boy..
I applaud this effort. Now I wish someone would do one for hotels where the shower controls seem designed for maximum confusion. I'm pretty sure there are conventions for hotel shower designers where they compete to make showers that spray you with freezing or scalding water or simply make it impossible for water to come out at all, while the controls look maximally pretty.
I've found the hotel the shower controls are akin to a bop-it...pull it...twist it...hit it....twist it....pull it....
More than 200 hotels already on this website. Wouldn't this be much more useful as an OpenStreetMap tag so people can find and share these good/bad hotels in whatever front-end they like?
There does not seem to be a tag for it yet. That there are apparently hundreds of instances, and it being definitely something you'd want to select for, makes me think it's a good fit for OSM. Currently, hotels can already have tags like phone number, reception opening hours, WiFi fees, etc. It might even be a good fit for the toilets:* namespace, since this has overlap with toilets in (semi-)public spaces offering different levels of privacy
You can't put affiliate links in OSM tags.
The list doesn't seem to be accurate. I looked at a few and found zero evidence of missing bathroom doors in reviews or photos. One even had a review complaining the bathroom door was broken and not closing fully... indicating it is actually there.
The website has no open data license so this isn't usable for OSM, even if we wanted to. I just meant to propose collaborating on an existing platform where we already have a lot of data about physical features, rather than erecting an ephemeral platform for this special purpose
This trend is the absolute bane of early-stage startups.
When you are bootstrapping and flying a team to a conference, sharing twin rooms is standard procedure to stretch the runway. There is nothing that kills the vibe of a "strategic roadmap discussion" faster than realizing you have zero acoustic privacy from your co-founder using the toilet 3 feet away.
It feels like hostile architecture specifically designed to break the "business frugality" use case. We ended up switching to Airbnbs solely because of this.
just book separate and cheaper motel rooms.
The purpose of no bathroom doors is to limit their use to single people or couples. They want business travelers to get a separate rooms or upgrade.
I can assure you not even single people nor couples want doorless bathrooms.
Single people or couples don't want doorless bathrooms, but they will probably tolerate them if forced into a room with that setup. Other types of travelers might not be so open-minded, and that's the point that OP is arguing about. Provide the bare minimum tolerable experience to your target audience and punish the customers you don't want.
Couples that poop together stay together.
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Why? I'd prefer a doorless bathroom.
One of my bedrooms at home opens into an open concept bathroom. No doors, vaulted ceilings, open.
I really don't get this.
I don't want to feel claustrophobic.
Edit: Like these -
https://34stjohn.com/blogs/inspiration/how-to-pull-off-an-op...
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I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.
> I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.
Right?
My wife and I don't use the toilet in front of each other. Even when we lived in an apartment with only 1 bathroom. You gotta use the toilet while one is showering? You can hold it.
Even when I'm home alone and don't expect her to come home any time soon, I close the door. I just feel so exposed with the door open. Even when I lived alone, I'm pretty sure I would close the door.
Whether the room has a door on the bathroom or not, business travellers should be getting separate rooms... Over dozens of trips, the only time I've ever shared was a two-bedroom apartment when I went with a colleague for a conference (one had an ensuite so we had separate bathrooms as well as separate bedrooms with doors).
I wouldn't be OK with going on trips (or sending people I manage on trips) where two people had to sleep in the same room, I wouldn't consider that acceptable...
I agree, it's a huge HR risk. It used to be common with British companies sending people abroad. I can't imagine they still do it today.
20 years ago a shared room was kinda the go-to for conferences and business meetings seemed like at companies I worked at. It was normal to share a 2 bed room with another guy, but all the hotels we ever stayed at had a bathroom with door that closed and didn't open straight to the bedroom. It also had a curtain or at least a frosted door if someone happened to open the door.
No, it is because doors take up a lot of space. A typical door is 3 feet wide, and requires 7-14 feet of empty space to operate [0]. You can't place any furniture, toiletries, or luggage racks in this space. For a typical hotel room of 300sq feet, this "dead space" represents 3-5% of the room. Removing the door allows hotels to decrease the size of each room, and fit more rooms on each floor, increasing profit.
This is why many newer hotels choose to sliding doors, which barely take up any space, or just remove doors entirely.
[0] For a door of r=3 feet, A door swings a minimum of 90 degrees, which takes 3.14 * 3*2 / 4 = 7.065 sq feet at a minimum to 14.1 sq feet to operate.
Unlikely, given that you don't know it has no door until after you get there.
And also, when I travel with my kids, I still want to close the door.
I'm in a committed long term relationship. I absolutely do not want to shit in front of my partner (nor do they have any desire to watch).
Only once have I seen anything like this. The room had a bathroom door, but also a giant hole cut out in the wall so that everyone in the room could peer into the bathroom for some reason. We demanded a different room with a complete wall separating the bathroom and got one (a nicer one at their expense too).
The Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata (just outside Ottawa), Ontario has bathrooms with windows in them.
There's a shade inside the glass, but still... did I really need to open the blinds to my bathroom?
https://www.brookstreethotel.com/rooms/double-queen
Having natural daylight in the bathroom is a plus for me.
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In my view, a hotel's primary function is to provide a comfortable bathroom and a comfortable night's sleep. Both should be simple. If is has failed in either, it has failed as a hotel altogether.
I now need extra wide space in the bathroom, so before booking I always check images on hotel-booking web sites, read reviews and look up video reviews of the hotel on YouTube.
There are surprisingly many video reviews of hotel rooms out there. Videos can also sometimes reveal whether a hotel bathroom has a particularly noisy fan, which is important to avoid for sleep.
The weirdest hotel bathroom I've encountered was in a top-floor suite. It had a door, but... multiple toilet seats and showers with no individual doors in-between them, nor to the multiple washbasins. There was no shortage of space for doors or partitions.
This is a huge theme (for lack of a better word) in Bangkok... I have seen countless condos with glass box bathrooms. My wife and I love each other deeply but we have 0 desire to make eye contact while pooping. Our daughter is another case but we both hope she will grow out of it.
At least in the US, the design choice of barn door or no door might also be driven by ADA compliance. You have to provide a lot of space to meet all the accessibility requirements and a hinged door can make the minimum square footage much higher than you’d think.
I think that's the real answer. ADA-compliant doors will not fit in many smaller hotel rooms.
This reminds me of the last time I was in Vegas for DEF CON and we booked rooms in this dimly-lit hotel that had surprisingly bright bathrooms with a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the shower. A similar mirror hung outside in the room on the wall opposite.
Yes, it was a one-way mirror looking in. A number of people who had booked rooms together had an exercise kicking their roommate out of the room to take showers that week.
On insta I'm seeing more stories about people reviewing/mocking OPS (Open plan shi.tters) on rental websites like rightmove.
Boldest choice thus far was the one with the OPS next to the kitchenette.
There are some very strange people out there...
A lot of rightmove ones are old people who need access to a toilet and don’t have room to install a whole new bathroom
Yeah, the joys of London real estate market :(
It would be a good idea to put some eye-catching example of a hotel room in the article headline, like an image of a shower without a door, just for visual impact. As for me, I’ve come across hotels where the shower is visible from the bedroom, separated only by a glass wall. Lol, that’s probably the next level.
The one I stayed at in France had this shit. Annoyed me to no end and plus I got sick on the trip.
This is a thing? I've only stayed at Premier Inns (a budget UK hotel chain) and have never heard of anything like this happening.
High end hotels are more likely to follow the fads in my experience. The cheap ones have a door but it might be damaged
I've seen it in the US in smaller dense urban rooms and it's honestly something I've never thought about.
It's honestly something it would never occur to me to write a blog post about. But I guess it's one of those things that some people are sensitive about.
I assume you must be a solo traveler?
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I first encountered it at a Hotel du Vin (UK) about 10 years ago.
Basically, just like the airlines, the hotels are saying if you are such a broke destitute to be able to upgrade to our premium tier, then go suffer in the smell of your own shit.
Dont give those airlines ideas. A doorless toilet at the back of the plane would be awesome (traditional usage of word)
I’m glad that someone has built this and made it their personal crusade, but this is a problem that I can’t relate to having. I find it far more uncomfortable/intimate to sleep next to someone (even if in separate beds) than to shower or use the toilet in front off someone. Snoring, farting, dream talking, morning erections, etc.
Somehow I seem to be in the minority with this opinion. But if we’re sharing a room we’re probably pretty comfortable with each other.
I've never seen this. But I'm kind of the opposite. When it comes to hotel rooms, I prefer function over form. A lot of hotels cover up their lack of quality with a lot of crap that serves no purpose whatsoever. Generic art reproductions on the wall. A lot of shiny chrome or bronze. A fancy looking shower that produces a luke warm mediocre flow of water that than splatters all over the bath room, etc. Or, worse, a dingy looking bath that you have to awkwardly step into and a shower head that will point anywhere except at you unless you hold it. I've seen it all. US hotels tend to be the worst on this front. It's all form over function and the amount of nonsense goes up with the number of stars.
What I want is:
- clean, comfortable bed. Preferably without pubic hairs from the previous occupant (which is what happens if the hotel cuts corners on servicing the rooms).
- a simple but functional shower with hot water
- enough toilet paper. I don't care about anyone folding the first sheet over. Who does that at home? Absolutely no-one I know.
- Power plugs next to the bed so I can charge my phone and use it while I'm on it.
- A window that can open and an AC with an off button.
- Wifi that works just like at home and doesn't kick me out every morning because some cookie expired.
- Bonus points if I don't get to listen in on the TV next door.
What I've found in some expensive premium hotels is the exact opposite of all of the above. Stuffy warm rooms. Barely functional plumbing. Windows that cannot open "for my safety", ACs that are producing noise and bad air 24x7 that are turned off at night to save energy. But the light fixtures are beautiful. And there are 20x more pillows and blankets on the bed than I need.
Some of the best hotels I've had were very affordable budget affairs aimed at return customers that are like me. Basically good management and pragmatic decoration is all you need to turn a mediocre room into a very comfortable one.
> a simple but functional shower with hot water
Sorry, no, not allowed. Hotel showers always have _something_ wrong with them; it's a law of nature.
Potential problems:
- No thermostatic valve (particularly common in the US and Spain, neither of which seems to believe that thermostatic valves exist at all)
- Leaks and/or insufficient drainage
- Overly complex control scheme
- Fixed showerhead, with no handheld shower at all (mostly a US thing)
- Arbitrarily loses pressure.
- Impossible to turn on without getting drenched in cold water
I don't _really_ care about the bathroom door thing that the website is so excited about, but I am constantly irritated by hotel showers.
My pet peeve is noisy fridges that clatter and whirr at night, and whose plug is inaccessible behind fixed furniture.
On the topic of hotel baths & showers, Dave Barry has this hilarious piece. Innovation in hotel shower controls has lead to UI/UX getting messed up.
https://davebarry.substack.com/p/hotel-showers
Dave Barry having a substack was such a bonus find here
Have had some where the shower is just glass panels for the room to see (and no, it wasn't that kind of hotel).
Another hotel in a small town here in Germany where it had shutter-style doors and where the roof of the bathroom didn't go all the way to the actual ceiling, so you can hear everything.
Both in the name of aesthetic, clearly.
I stayed at one in Iceland where the entire bathroom wall facing the living room was unfrosted glass, including the door. The living room was open concept so it was hard to avoid seeing into the bathroom. Great place for couples to bring their entire selves to the relationship.
Possibly even more important than a door is an extractor fan. Sometimes two people gotta do their business and get out in rapid succession.
Glass box bathrooms are common in lower end Chinese hotels. So they don’t really have a door, and you are separated from the rest of the room by a glass pane. Weird, but not the worst I’ve experienced. The worst is when the shower straddles the squat toilet.
I really prefer bathrooms with a separate door for the separate toilet from the rest of it. And the shower has to be a walk in, but bathtubs are really only common in North America outside of higher end resorts that have both a separate walk in shower and a bathtub.
Love this. I was super scared the first time i was booking travel to Europe with a newish girlfriend.
If you’re doing intentional travel with a significant other you should probably already be at the “pooping with the door open” phase.
Married with baby here—this is not a phase. Baby is the only one comfortable pooping with the door open.
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In my long dating years, I've never pooped my bathroom door open. Never even farted next to a girl. Is this disgusting behavior normal to some people?
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We went on a driving trip a couple months ago. Every single hotel we stayed in had those stupid barn door style doors on the bathroom.
Not only do they leave a multiple inch gap, but are very easily opened by my curious one and two year old children.
There was zero privacy the entire trip.
Bring back real doors, with locks!
Perhaps I say at all the wrong (right?) hotels but... I stay in close to two dozen North American hotels a year and I haven't noticed this trend? Many have pocket doors but I can't think of a hotel in recent memory that was missing it completely. I usually partially close them so it's not as cold getting out of a shower so I hope I would have taken note if it wasn't there.
It's been a while since I've stayed in one but separation in Yotels seemed to be pretty much missing. Can't think of other chains in particular.
Recently I stayed in the Korean hotel where the toilet and the bathroom had the door but made out of semi transparent glass. And the worst, the toilet was next to the glass and walls while on the opposite side was bed. Perfect view and the smell my friend
If someone cares about this so much to make a website, why not include an explanation? There's mention of dignity. I don't feel my dignity lessened when my bathroom has no door. Perhaps the door is useful to keep the heat and the steam inside the bathroom?
If you only stay in hotels alone, it probables doesn’t matter that much to you. Quite apart from questions of dignity, when sharing a hotel room, there are practical conveniences: it’s nice to keep odors contained, and to be able to turn on the bathroom light at night without waking anyone up.
What is there to explain? Bathroom needs to be isolated.
Do they also have to explain why there are walls around your bathroom and it's not just a commode next to a bed?
My first no-bathroom door hotel experience was 2017 in a hotel in Vientiane. We were so baffled we asked, and they proudly explained that this was a "European bathroom". It was literally set up so that you had full view of the room (and vice versa) when taking a shit.
Simple action for those who are unhappy with this situation (and a suggestion for this website creator/ owner): hotels appear to be linked to their booking.com listing. Take a few minutes to select some hotels from the list (possibly at random), then go to their Booking.com page, search for reviews mentioning the lack of a bathroom door, and mark them as helpful. The website could agevolate this process by providing a list of direct link to booking.com pages of the offending hotels.
"Sliding doors"? What's this guy's problem with sliding doors? This is the best type of door there is, all bathrooms ever should have sliding doors!
Worst I've ever seen was a bathroom that didn't have walls!
Well, there was this hip-high divider wall, barely enough to hide my cheeks while I took a shit. Forget about masking sounds and smell.
I generally enjoy eye contact with my wife, but not while I'm pooping!
I've recently stayed at a new Holiday Inn Express near NYC. It had a proper bathroom, nothing to complain about. But there was no ventilation at all. There was this American-style air conditioner under the window and some small outlet in the bathroom, but I couldn't force the air conditioner to force-intake air. It's either super-noisy with compressor running or completely off. I absolutely don't understand how it is even possible that room has no ventilation.
Not to mention these modern showers that have a slab of glass on the 1st 3rd but then open door for the rest such that water leaks all over the place. Looks great on insta but sucks at being a shower.
I had not been at hotels with bathroom without a door, but I would want them to have a door like the people who wrote the article allegedly do. What I could do without is a TV set and many other things, but I would want to have a door, and a desk, and fresh air.
I wonder if this is because hotels are in a race to seem "cool" and "edgy." Will this trend get to the point where they cut a hole on the middle of the mattress and tell you to just lie down and shit right there?
I think it would be more effective if the site was analyzing existing reviews - and encouraging people to leave scathing reviews where a hotel decides that bathroom doors are optional.
A standalone web site isn't going to make it into the hotel's metrics, "the most driver of sub-9/10 ratings is the lack of bathroom doors" will make them find a way to reinstall them pronto.
I actually analyze the photos of the hotelrooms looking for the bathroom door before I book a hotel room these days.
Has become this new weird step to take during bookings.
I noticed in East Asia, they also have some tendency to have floor to ceiling windows through the whole bathroom to the bedroom, sometimes with no curtain either. I am not sure who this is for
The legend is that if you invite a lady for the night, it's so you and she can keep an eye on each other, in case either is worried about one going through their stuff/wallet while the other is in the bathroom.
I stayed in such a hotel, and getting up to go the bathroom I noticed someone had flicked a business-card-sized advertisement under the door, for said companionship...
Hotel safes are a much simpler solution to this problem...
I've seen that in japan, but they had a switch that would electronically switch off the window (it would become opaque white).
I've been talking about making a site like this for years! It is easily the number two criteria I have when looking for hotels after location.
isnt the compromise usually that the stalls have fully enclosed doors if the bathroom doesnt?
Personally I like having both. Doors are great for a variety of reasons, not just privacy.
>’m done. I’m done arriving at hotels and discovering that they have removed the bathroom door. Something that should be as standard as having a bed, has been sacrificed in the name of “aesthetic”.
In what country or region are we here? I've never seen a bathroom without a door in a hotel.
Or anywhere, really, for that matter.
Nice Collection! Glass box are good for couples and all. But if you're traveling with group friends, it could be awkward.
The typical couple does not want a glass box.
If there's no door between the toilet bowl and the bed, the bed is in the bathroom.
Take a dump in the lobby bathroom, and crap on the seat and clog the toilet with paper, maybe they will learn
Wait, are hotels now taking bathroom doors away? It’s awful enough when they don’t let you lock the door.
Ok so it's not just me. I keep staying in hotels where there's a bathroom door, but it's partially see-through. Clearly they were ok spending the money for a door but decided they don't want to give privacy. Didn't bother me, but it stuck out.
I am a frequent traveller(literally have the star alliance card).
Although I’ve never stayed in a hotel without bathroom doors, they frequently have sliding doors which don’t seal properly. So that’s the first thing I look out for nowadays.
I agree bathroom doors are sensible when traveling with company. When staying alone, though, I prefer no doors. If there is a door, I tend to use a small piece of gaffers' tape to hold it open. I don't spend a lot of time in the hotel room, so while I'm in there I want my movement unimpeded.
The worst I've experienced was a sliding barn door which covered either the bathroom or the clothes rack. If I wanted my clothes to breathe, I had to shut the bathroom with a door that only impedes movement and does not provide privacy. If I wanted to move around freely, I had to shut my clothes in!
I usually stay 50+ nights/year at hotels all across the value spectrum and haven't thought about this until now! Proper bathroom doors _are_ hard to come by.
"There has to be a safety/design reason for this," I thought. And, sure enough, there is: https://old.reddit.com/r/hotels/comments/1gmearh/hotel_desig...
TL;DR: Sliding doors are an easier way to keep hotel rooms up to code long-term than doors that need to be refitted/redesigned if the room changes.
To me, what's more annoying than sliding bathroom doors (which honestly haven't bothered me that much, though I usually travel alone) are:
1) Sliding shower doors that are ill-fitted and don't close properly, and
2) Bathrooms without proper ventilation (though I learned why vent fans are uncommon in hotels in the US: https://old.reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/18z9sd0...)
Just returned from Malaga in Spain. The EasyHotel we stayed in had frosted glass cubicle for the toilet and shower. But there were huge gaps in between. Haha!
Along with a closing door, a nice loud exhaust fan is appreciated.
And hooks… Too many hotel rooms without enough hooks to hang things like worn clothes, jackets…
Isn't that what all the hangers are for? Hangers are generally a lot better for your clothes and jackets than hooks.
We need to raise the price of our rooms. Take the doors off the hinges in half, call them 'standard', and the rest are now 'premium'.
In my experience, hotels in most of the world already ~doubled their rates since COVID while also taking the door...
like adding basic to basic economy for plane tickets, and adding an even lower class of service
A way to force people to buy separate rooms?
This is some new age Costanza shit.
Joking aside, I find this far more in newer European hotels for whatever reason (though I'm sure it exists stateside and elsewhere too). My wife and I at this point just agree to tell each other when we're going to occupy it because we don't feel like it getting weird. Feels like - if the conspiracy-ish theory of it being used to dissuade people sharing rooms is true - they're inadvertently throwing out the couples dynamic.
To borrow another Seinfeld bit: there's good naked and bad naked. The glass door problem invites the latter.
I only know about this because of the scene in the White Lotus.
Which scene are you referring to?
I get the point, but myself have no intention of ever sharing a hotel room with anyone I am not comfortable to concurrently use a bathroom with, i.e. my gf/wife. I would much rather see an initiative to show me if a hotel shower has a proper way to keep the water in, so I do not have to use three towels to provide some sort of spot where I can properly dry off whilst not standing ankle deep in water. Never understood why this is the case in so many hotels, it does nt seem to aid cleaning staff either. That, and a proper filter for on premises parking (not the "public parking is plentiful around the hotel" in the fine print bs), and for wifi, show me the speedtest results please.
I'm interested to see where zoning laws permit this kind of stuff.
Not sure why it would be a zoning thing.
Zoning does a lot of weird things. My zoning laws require me to put immediate hot water at every faucet. there is no code requiring it. There is zero safety issue.
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Likely for the same reason that fans are often a building code requirement.
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My state does not require a door on a guest bathroom in a hotel. A bathroom serving employees and the public in a hotel is required to have a self-closing door, but the law does not say anything about doors on guest only bathrooms.
I couldn’t find anything in the International Building Code about bathroom doors aside from minimum opening width, but I don’t have access to the full code. I’d have to ask an architect or GC to verify.
> 4625.1200 TOILET REQUIREMENTS.
> Every hotel, motel, and lodging house shall be equipped with adequate and conveniently located water closets for the accommodation of its employees and guests. Water closets, lavatories, and bathtubs or showers shall be available on each floor when not provided in each individual room. Toilet, lavatory, and bath facilities shall be provided in the ratio of one toilet and one lavatory for every ten occupants, or fraction thereof, and one bathtub or shower for every 20 occupants, or fraction thereof. Toilet rooms shall be well ventilated by natural or mechanical methods. The doors of all toilet rooms serving the public and employees shall be self-closing. Toilets and bathrooms shall be kept clean and in good repair and shall be well lighted and ventilated. Hand-washing signs shall be posted in each toilet room used by employees. Every resort shall be equipped with adequate and convenient toilet facilities for its employees and guests. If privies are provided they shall be separate buildings and shall be constructed, equipped, and maintained in conformity with the standards of the commissioner and shall be kept clean.
> https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/4625.1200/
A water closet is just water shelving without a door.
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Related:
What happened to bathroom doors? [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062242)
Forget the bathroom doors; can we at least bring back proper shower stall design that uses full-length doors instead of the 1/3-length piece of glass? More glaringly, those of you who know the Hilton MUC for instance, it's utterly mind blowing what they've done: the shower stall floor is on the same plane as the rest of the bathroom floor -- i.e., it's not sunken at all -- and it's not sloped or otherwise angled, either, to prevent water from seeping under the door and flood the whole floor. And this isn't like one-off bug in one room: we've stayed their countless times, in different rooms, and every single one suffers this problem.
To me that design screams it is a love hotel primarily used for one night stands and those beds you've slept on have been used for various such reasons. There isn't much dignity to be had after that.
I wish I could upvote this multiple times.
Only slightly relevant, but at the Porsche dealership in Odesa, Ukraine, their bathroom has two toilets together in the one open space, with a chessboard on a plinth between them. The Ukrainians are very funny. I can share a photo if anyone's interested.
I have long standardised the way I do hotel reviews:
- bullshit wifi connectivity (e.g. captive wifi + OTP)? - normal wifi but with very long password? - is there a place to put toiletries in the shower? - clean? - time to check in and check out?
Where I travel the hotels without bathroom doors have not proliferated yet. I've been in a few, even when I am alone I hate the experience.
Just when you think you’ve seen all the corporate/business fuckery in this world. I already ask stuff like — is it a non-smoking room or not, do not use a strong room freshener when prepping the room (or better save money and skip freshener), etc. Now do I have to ask — whether your room has a bathroom door or not? Fucking hell! Hopefully, such fucked-up trends don’t reach this corner of the world at the speed and efficiency with which COVID did.
For the rest of the world: it seems way more common in the US/americas to share rooms than it is elsewhere.
Rooms with two queen-sized beds sitting next to each other are pretty standard, even in mid and high range hotels, while I’ve never seen those elsewhere.
So yeah people share these rooms as it’s usually quite cheaper than getting two rooms. I did it with friends and my in laws.
It seems like the target hotel customer for fancy hotels is an Instagram model or a Kardashian. I get having a sliding door to the bathroom or translucent walls on the shower is annoying but the status symbols in hotels are not designed for your average hacker News poster. They're trying to make a small room in an older building look like a bigger room to justify the price.
More useful than this would be speed test results from the hotel wifi.
The free wifi in my last hotel in Tokyo was 800Mbps symmetric. I’m ruined forever.
One of my favourite hotels in SE Asia has this problem. (I won't name and shame, since when we complained they said it's going to be fixed soon in a redesign.)
On the topic, though... I want a desk that isn't made of glass so that I can use a mouse. Optical mice have been the standard for years, and of course I don't carry a mousepad. Who thinks glass desktops are good?
The people's champ
It's nice to see a passion project.
Doorless bathrooms, open office plans. As it turns out , people like privacy
London, Marriot, W. Sink in the bedroom. Just No.
https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/2e/9...
That would be weird and uncomfortable traveling with a kid. Is it geographic or is this madness taking over the world? Seems like something that would get a place destroyed in reviews and lose them business.
My personal "travel hack" for a while now is to poo in communal facilities that hardly ever seem to be in use in any hotel I've stayed in. I don't understand why anyone wants to poo a metre from their bed, regardless of a door.
As for showering, I don't really care to be honest. I'm cleaning my naked body. It's not some super secret affair that nobody is allowed to see.
Having said that I've yet to encounter a hotel where the toilet/shower isn't private.
What I really care about when travelling is being able to sleep which means the correct noise level and temperature. Far too many hotel rooms are simply too warm. Who the hell can sleep at 23 degrees with gigantic fluffy duvets designed for Nordic countries and no fan/airflow?
I've thought about making a similar site for this issue before but, ultimately, I don't travel anywhere near enough for it to be worth it. These days I just assume travelling will be shit sleep, and if it isn't then it's a bonus.
Also bring back brighter lighting?
Is it just me, or have hotel rooms gotten dimmer?
It seems less cheerful.
Not sure if they have gotten dimmer. Possibly the opposite: I don't remember having noticed it recently (but I've also travelled a lot less), but I do remember being very annoyed by this many years ago.
No idea why hotels were doing it, neither LEDs nor the electricity for them are that expensive and I doubt anyone wants to be stuck in a dark cave.
That's probably intentional to prevent you from realizing how unsanitary the room really is.
Can we have a website for these things too?
I wonder if the bathroom for the hotel staff is doorless too.
This is done, presumably, so people dont buddy up to save money on rooms. They'll be too shy or modest. So if its 4 people traveling, say 2 couples, they'll rent two rooms instead of one.
Then why offer twin beds?
There are two possibilities:
They find this out in advance and find a 'normal' hotel and book a room there.
They find this out when they get to the hotel, complain to everyone, write bad reviews, never come back.
Lose-lose for the hotel (unless it's some remote destination with just one hotel there, but those are rare)
No doubt this same hotel is proud of their green credentials.
I can not even imagine sharing a room with another couple under any circumstances
Anecdotal, but this reminded me of when I attended a conference in las vegas, booked two to a room, and unbeknownst to us or the booking agency, the hotel had a large window between the shower and the sleeping area that had no kind of shade or cover at all. It was extremely awkward - ultimately I and the other occupant agreed on being out of the room when the other showered.
This site showed me a few links, like booking.com. Booking.com took 40 seconds to load with all its weird JavaScript, popups, and blocks. Is this the norm to have extremely heavy sites like this?
One doorless bathroom if you are interested:
https://cf.bstatic.com/xdata/images/hotel/max1024x768/919323...
If this is a trend, I have not noticed it. Are there particular brands and/or regions where there is happening?
I’m in the states and haven’t seen this despite a lot of travel but I’ll be looking out for it now!
had no idea this was a 'thing' .
Any hotel room without a bathroom door has been repeatedly blasted with fecal air covering all surfaces some order of magnitude more than rooms with a door
Actual reason - users would lock the door before suicdice or during mental health events. Or even just refuse to leave.
No door, one less thing to worry about.
Bad, bad architects.
They have a reason for this choice. I remember studying it at university—the professor said that when people have intimacy, there's no need for doors.
But what if you have a guest? And what if your poop stinks?
Incredibly low-IQ people.
Well now I feel like a pretty smug 1%-er since I've never been in a hotel room with no bathroom door.
It's not a function of price. One of the most expensive hotels in Southeast Asia has this problem. I've complained. They said they're fixing it in an upcoming design refresh.
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If you're cofortable enough to share a hotel room, you should be willing to watch them poop. Lighten up.
Always interesting to see the privacy fear of americans. The rest of the world isn’t afraid of non-sexual intimacy with friend/family.
Pooping isn't intimacy.
This doesn't have anything to do with Americans.
And europeans.