Hotel workers have a 40% higher injury rate than other service workers.
Women are 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men, because nearly every hotel housekeeper is a woman, and housekeepers have a 50% higher injury rate than all hotel workers.
Hispanic housekeepers are two-thirds more likely to be injured than white housekeepers.
91 percent of hotel housekeepers have suffered work-related pain.
66 percent take pain medication just to get through their daily work.
Here’s how you can make housekeepers’ jobs a little less shitty.
Reduce bending situations. For instance, hotels often tell you to toss towels on the floor that you want replaced. Try setting the towels on the closed toilet instead.
Gather all the trash cans into one.
Leave a note saying not to change the towels every day.
Write a note with a tip thanking the housekeeper for not making the beds.
You can strip the beds by taking off all the sheets (including the ones holding the duvet, if that’s the system the hotel uses) and pillowcases, putting them in a pile, and then piling or loosely folding the blankets and duvet and putting them in a separate pile with the pillows on the stripped bed.
Tip daily. The same housekeepers aren’t always there every day.
$2-5 per person, per day is the expected gratuity if you’re a courteous guest.
Remember to mark it clearly for them so they know it’s for them to take (as opposed to leaving bills just sitting out willy-nilly).
Do Not Disturb: If you put up a Do Not Disturb sign, the housekeeper is usually just given another room to clean. In a lot of cases, that new room will be outside their normal section, one of the leftover rooms in another part of the hotel. This means they’ll have to push their heavy cart a little farther, spend time waiting for an elevator, and then have to clean a little faster to get it done. That other room might also be a normal, fine room, or it might be a disaster zone, where someone gutted a fish in the tub or spilled Pepsi on the bed. And if there isn’t an extra room to be given to a housekeeper when they have a DND, they’ll probably just be sent home early (especially if it’s a non-union hotel), so they lose some of that day’s pay.
For all these reasons, try not to use the DND sign. Just tidy up your room as much as possible, follow the steps above, and leave a tip. Your room will just count as an easy clean, and maybe the housekeeper can take a couple minutes to sit in the armchair and rest instead of rushing to the next room.
