Glass bathrooms, excess pillows: 17 signs your hotel has bad taste

Who doesn’t love checking into a hotel? What’s the room going to be like? Will the bedding be up to scratch? Will there be a bath? Sometimes, you check in and are delighted. Lovely view. Press a quick hand to the mattress; yes, that feels decent enough. Nice toiletries in the bathroom, splendid.

On the other hand, you may step into your designated bedroom and find – inexplicably – that there’s only a glass wall separating the bed and the bathroom. Just, why? Below is a list of ever-so-slightly common hotel features that we could really do without, these days. Although, firstly, a quick clarification. Common doesn’t necessarily mean cheap. We’re not talking budget hotels here. Or at least, not specifically. Instead, this is a list of vulgar or twee designs and features that you may find in cheap hotels, but may equally come across in quite posh ones. Book very carefully.

That glass partition wall between the bedroom and bathroom

Picture the scene: you have a new lover and you’re going away together for the first time. You’ve booked a chic new hotel you read about in a Sunday supplement and packed your best underpants. You check in, go upstairs to the room and discover, to your horror, that the only thing separating the bed and the loo (never toilet) is this glass wall.

Whichever hotel designer kicked off this trend should be in prison. Absolute pervert. Occasionally, you may also come across rooms with windows designed to look like portholes between the bathroom and bedroom. This can be particularly annoying in the middle of the night if someone nips to the loo and turns the bathroom light on, thereby waking their partner. I suspect the same pervert was at work here.

Hairdryers attached to the bathroom wall

This implies the hotel thinks little of its guests. Also, they’re useless; you might as well have someone breathing heavily over your head. In fact, that might be more pleasurable than using one of these.

Obvious televisions

There is an increasing vogue for fashionable hotels not to have TVs in their rooms at all. A few others have hidden ones, tucked behind artwork or panelling. It’s lovely to loll around in a dressing gown after a bath and stick something bad on the telly, but is the decor of any room improved by an enormous flat-screen drilled to the wall opposite your bed? I humbly suggest not.

A feature wall

Extremely Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, even more so if the wallpaper is shiny. Nothing wrong with a room where all four walls are the same colour.

Nasty little synthetic coverlets that crackle when you touch them…

Is that a coffee stain or blood? When was it last washed? How many naked bottoms have sat on this? I don’t want to know the answers to any of these questions; I just don’t want that synthetic and highly flammable piece of material on my bed.

…or indeed a bed runner

Who first looked at a bed and thought, “I know what this is missing: an entirely useless strip of fabric draped over the end of it”? Deeply unsanitary – shoes have been on them, suitcase wheels have been on them, naked bottoms have also probably been on them.

Bed cushions

Grubby hair magnets that haven’t ever been laundered. Especially if they’re velvet.

A pleather headboard

No explanation required.

Towel art

Tell you what, housekeeping, if you spent more time cleaning and less time constructing elaborate swans from the towels, the hotel might have a better rating on Tripadvisor. (I once read that glasses in hotel rooms are often washed and dried quickly using the towels used by the room’s previous occupants, because housekeeping has so little time to get around each room between check-out and check-in. Consider rinsing your glass before using it, perhaps?)

UHT milk

I don’t wish to sound too Marie Antoinette, but is it so hard to put a little bottle of fresh milk in the minibar fridge? Plastic thimbles of UHT are especially unforgivable in more upmarket hotels. Odd to go to all the trouble of equipping each room with an expensive coffee machine and then skimp on the milk. Don’t do it.

Thin or lumpy pillows

Give me four feathery pillows in crisp white cotton pillow covers. Nobody needs more pillows than that. Pillow menus were briefly thrilling but are also a bit passé now. An aromatherapy pillow filled with spelt chaff and lavender won’t help me sleep if I’m worrying about the coverlet at the end of the bed.

A carpet that looks like it’s designed to hide stains

Correct. It has been designed to hide stains. Best not think about which stains. Keep your hotel slippers on at all times.

A fake plant covered with dust

Or any fake plant at all, for that matter.

Scratchy loo roll

We don’t need to go into too much detail here, but you know the sort. No one needs to exfoliate down there.

Dubious art

This can apply in expensive hotels as well as cheaper ones. Bad Monet replicas, drilled to the walls; a terrible watercolour of a mountain; abstract blocks of colour; peculiar geometric shapes that look like a GCSE project; a black-and-white photo of a leaf; and so on. Blank walls would have been preferable, in many cases.

The faint smell of cigarettes

Smoking hasn’t been allowed inside for years, so why can I still detect a whiff of B&H?

Overly complicated lighting

Give me a lamp. Give me a good, old-fashioned lamp that can be easily turned on and off, instead of a spaceship panel of switches. Last year, staying at a posh hotel in Spain, I spent a good 20 minutes trying to work out how to turn off the light for an afternoon snooze, only to give up in the end and cover my eyes with one of my socks (because I didn’t have an eye mask). My kingdom for a lamp.

The Telegraph, London