It is time someone stood up to the tyrannies of the hotel industry

The reality of 21st-century life is that many of us are forced to travel frequently on business. This is likely to be true whether you are a software engineer, journalist, banker, airline pilot, sports star, Bollywood actor or a professor. Sometimes it is fun but often it is mundane and tiring: the jetlag, the long wait in the airport lounge, the search for taxis in an unfamiliar and wet city, the expensive but uniformly tasteless food. The hotel is then supposed to be a refuge, a home away from home.

Yet, it is extraordinary that the vast and lucrative hotel industry is so completely insensitive to the needs of the average business traveller. Having endured outrage after outrage, I have decided to raise a flag of revolt against this unbearable tyranny. I hope that this article will instigate a general uprising from my fellow travellers and force change — yes, we can!

The hotel industry likes to say that it pays great attention to the little things that make a guest comfortable. When pressed for specific examples, hotel managers will inevitably fall back on that irritating orchid that they place every night on the bed. However, I have never met anyone to whom it makes the slightest difference. Most will just flick the flower off the sheets and never give it a thought.

Personally, I would rather lower my carbon footprint by not importing orchids from halfway around the world.

Let us then turn to matters that really matter. Take, for instance, the “Master Switch” that hotels place next to the bed. The idea presumably is that you get into bed, read for a few minutes, switch off all the lights with a single flick and then roll over to sleep.

This never happens in reality for there is always a lamp on the other side of the room that is inexplicably not connected to the Master Switch. The tired traveller must then kick off the blanket and trudge across to the lamp only to discover that there is no obvious way to turn it off. In the end, the only solution, short of calling the emergency hotline, is to crawl under the table and pull out the plug.

By this time, the poor hotel guest will be wide awake and totally unable to fall asleep.

I would have accepted the failures of the Master Switch as mere negligence but I have growing evidence of deliberate malice. I once stayed at a well-known hotel in London that had been recently refurbished to look “cool” by one of those celebrity designers. As a seasoned road warrior, I cleverly switched off the lights before getting into bed as I fully expected to have to deal with that irritating lamp. This time the lamps went off but the frame of the television lit up in a bright, neon blue. After struggling for fifteen minutes to turn off this eerie apparition, I gave up and called the reception for help. The duty manager told me that the light could not be switched without turning off the electricity supply of the whole floor! He then haughtily informed me that this was the brilliant idea of some famous designer. Ultimately, the only way I could fall asleep was to place a pillow on top of my face to block out the glow of florescent blue.

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There are many more examples of such premeditated persecution. The most damning evidence comes from the way hotel showers are designed. It usually requires a doctorate in quantum physics to work out how to get the water to the correct temperature. The more expensive the hotel, the more likely you are to be faced with a bewildering array of knobs and buttons of no known function. As with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one can never know which direction is hot and which cold. How much would it cost to mark them blue and red? Or, as I suspect, it is deliberate malice. I can see the hotel staff rolling with laughter at the annual staff party as they imagine their guests being alternately frozen and scalded in the shower.

One cannot even be sure that one will get a dry towel when one is finished with the harrowing bathing experience. Many hotels like to place the bath towels in a place they are guaranteed to get wet as soon as the shower is turned on. On a recent visit to a hotel in Jakarta, I found the stack of towels arranged on a wooden stool placed directly under the shower. A purple orchid had been artistically placed on top as if it would somehow block off the deluge. Who thought of that? Does the orchid have the same significance as the mocking signs that serial killers leave behind at the crime scene?

All this raises some issues of international importance. Are the similarities in these experiences around the world a mere coincidence or is the global hotel industry secretly coordinating its terrorist activities? Is there a school where new recruits are taught that room service always takes “at least 40 minutes” irrespective of what has been ordered? The community of business travellers needs to wake up to the danger before it is too late.