Comment by rjdj377dhabsn
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
What I believe:
It's to encourage e.g. two coworkers to get separate rooms instead of one room with separate beds. The increase in revenue is more than the construction cost.
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Review and vote with your wallet and your feet
This strategy is so successful, it brought down Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Monsanto, and Boeing.
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People with more dollars get more votes
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I did indeed.
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.
We installed an outdoor shower at our house. There's nothing as nice as a cold shower outdoors on a really hot day. It feels so luxurious that I can pretend I'm a rich person instead of lower- to mid-middle class.
We live way out in the boonies, so that helps.
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I wasn't expecting to read a Hyperion reference in this thread, such a great book.
(And if you haven't read the book you can guess what could possibly go wrong with this setup.)
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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.
> One of my short stories takes place in a not-to-distant future, where there is absolutely no privacy.
You might like “We” by Eugene Zamiatin.
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It was quite shocking for me as somebody from eastern Europe to see ie Danish or Dutch homes having no curtains whatsoever, so me walking on sidewalk looking at them 3m from me behind the windows having breakfast, in pyjamas, kids doing early morning nasal cavities treasure hunt with finger etc.
Same for living rooms and bedrooms (those I would expect to at least have some curtains aside).
Still not used to it, i like my privacy and ability to shamelessly say scratch my butt when alone if needed.
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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.
I think it's an unavoidable consequence of the space constraints they're working with.
On the plus side, when I dayroomed there it was dead silent and the room had blackout curtains.
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.
Well, I still don't wanna make everybody in the room have to listen to my grunts as I push out an unhealthy binge-drinking hangover turd followed by a liter of flatulent gas and and liquid spraying into the bowl. I like my privacy, kthx.
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If it's not scandalous, can I shit in the lobby trashcan? If the hotel wants me to have an audience, might as well...
It's not, but I prefer not being heard and not hearing over being heard or hearing.
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Some people make noise when they eat with their mouth open. It's not scandalous, it's just ignorant and gross. It's always an utter clod that is so unaware of themselves just smucking and squelching away on their open mouth full of gloopy donut muck.
It's not a virtue to be so unselfcounscious. It's not about being ashamed or inhibited or in pathological denial of biological realities. It's about being fucking minimally considerate and just the tiniest bit self-aware.
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But it is a good argument for privacy.
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?
In my part of the US, a lot of our "old" houses were built before indoor plumbing.
So when the plumbing was installed, obviously some went to the kitchen. And the bathroom, which previously didn't exist, was often an addition to (or a division from) the kitchen -- with a doorway [with a door] betwixt the kitchen and the bathroom -- because that made the plumbing easier.
IIRC, that particular feature disqualifies the home for financing with both the VA and with HUD for reasons of hygiene.
So by extension: According to VA and HUD, hygiene requires at least one door and at least one additional room of separation between the place where you shit and the place where you eat.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_plume
A door provides at least some kind of physical barrier.
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Flushing generates aerosols that travel.
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Little pieces of shit can fly through the air quite far when the wc is flushed. As a former British person I had no idea about this, but was brought up to speed by US family members..
Update: this is why you should put the lid down to flush. But put it back up again after because <reasons>
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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.
The problem here is that "mean" is a poor average. For hotels, if you're rating in 10 different categories, you really want a single 0/10 to bring the overall score down by way more than one point.
The opposite situation can also occur. At my university, entrance scholarships were decided a few years ago based on students' aggregate score across 25ish dimensions (I can't remember the exact number) where students were each rated 1-4. Consequently a student who was absolutely exceptional in one area would be beaten out by a student who was marginally above average in all the other areas. I suggested that rather than scoring 1-4 the scores should be 1/2/5/25 instead.
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Honestly, the ratings on those sites are essentially useless anyway, because people are bad at reviewing.
I generally sample the lowest rating written reviews, to check if people are complaining about real stuff, or are just confused. For instance, if a hotel doesn't have a bar, some of the negative reviews will usually be about how the hotel doesn't have a bar; these can be safely ignored as having been written by idiots (it is not like the hotel is hiding the fact that it doesn't have a bar).
Occasionally some of the positive reviews are similarly baffling. Was recently booking a hotel in Berlin in January, and the top review's main positive comment about the hotel was that it had heating. Well, yeah, I mean, you'd hope so. I can only assume that the reviewer was a visitor from the 19th century.
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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”.
The author does point out glass doors being an issue that he asks about.
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.
In London that will get you a different set of problems. Like gaps in the window frame, and a damp smell in the bathroom without ventilation.
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My most recent encounter with no-bathroom-door was in a hotel in London that was under 100 pounds a night. Though the room was so tiny that I'd honestly be happy enough to give them a pass on it.
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?
I’m as confused as you
I remember hotel in China several years ago where the bathroom had a door, but the wall between bathroom and sleeping area was unfrosted glass with no blind. Idiotic design trend.
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