Say Goodbye to Daily Hotel Room Cleaning

Stephanie VanDerSchie returned to her hotel room in Wausau, Wis., after a long day of skiing last month with her three young children to find their room disheveled.

Their sheets were untucked, their garbage can was overflowing, and their soggy towels were in limp piles on the damp bathroom floor.

Ms. VanDerSchie, 44, a high school teacher in River Forest, Ill., assumed that for the $200 a night she was paying, she’d at least get new towels and a quick room refresh daily, without having to make a special request during her three-night stay.

She was wrong.

“It seemed like a money-saving tactic,” Ms. VanDerSchie said. “But the feeling of vacation is enhanced when someone else is looking after us a little, for sure.”

A pandemic disruption, continued

In the early days of the pandemic, the daily cleaning of hotel rooms was among the many routines disrupted. Even people who dared to travel blanched at the idea of a stranger entering their rooms. Many hotels started cleaning only after guests checked out, even letting some lodgings sit empty for a day.

Now, with travel largely having rebounded, and with occupancy levels projected to reach 64 percent this year — just 2 percent shy of prepandemic levels, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, daily cleaning, like the five-day office workweek for many people and printed menus at restaurants, seems to have become a thing of the past.

Guests staying at midlevel hotels run by Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Walt Disney World Resorts or other major brandss are finding that if they want complimentary daily housekeeping, they need to request it — or clean their own room.

“Cleaning surfaces and changing bedsheets during shorter stays is now quite rare,” said Scott Keyes, the founder of Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights) a website detailing airfare deals. “Oftentimes, it’s only offered during longer stays.”

Marriott, which operates 30 hotel brands and more than 8,000 properties in 139 countries and territories, trumpeted the new normal during an investor call in February. It said that it was creating a tier system for housekeeping, in which those who paid more could expect a higher level of service. Its highest-end properties (like the Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis brands, where rooms run upward of $550 a night) would continue to provide free daily cleanings. At the next level (Sheraton, Le Méridien) guests would get a free “daily tidy.” Guests at what it calls its “select-service”…