Vacations can be wonderfully relaxing, especially if you’re staying in a luxury hotel with a pool, spa and a great restaurant. But regardless of the caliber of your accommodations, your hotel room may not be as clean as it appears. Here’s what you should do to ensure you don’t come home with whatever germs the previous guests left behind.
- Remove the comforter. Sheets and pillowcases are easy to wash. But bedspreads, not so much. So some hotels don’t – not even between guests. In fact, a hotel bedspread might only be changed four times a year!
- Disinfect. If checkout is at 11 and check in is at 3, that means the housekeeping staff have a limited amount of time to get those rooms ready. Surely they change the sheets and hopefully scrub the bathroom, but they may not have enough time to wipe down remote controls, light switches, and doorknobs. That means it’s up to you to give these often touched items a quick cleaning with an antibacterial wipe.
- Check for bedbugs. Check your mattress, bed frame, and headboard for small brown stains. Bedbugs are hard to see, but they leave behind brown bloodstains when they process the blood of their victims. Be sure to check under the sheets and mattress pad, too.
- Clothing not optional. Try to limit direct skin contact with the carpet and furniture so you don’t pick up any potential fungus. That means wear socks or slippers and be fully clothed when sitting on chairs or the sofa.
- Shampoo the tub. Even if the bottom of the tub looks clean, squirt shampoo in the tub and run the water on hot for a minute or so before getting in. This will decrease the number of germs present where you’ll be standing. As for taking a bath, you may want to skip that entirely.