Never use the hotel bathroom phone. Here's why?

For many years, and even today, hotels place phones in their bathrooms, usually next to the toilet, to comply with brand standards. We have one simple question. Why?

Ask yourself how many times have you sat on the toilet and made or received a phone call in a hotel bathroom toilet. From day one they have been an ill conceived, poorly researched feature but there are serious implications on your health if you use one and don’t thoroughly wash your hands, hair and face after use.

Let’s start from the basics.

Hotel bathrooms are dirty environments with bodily fluid, urine and faeces being abundant, even flushing the toilet with the lid up sprays micro bacteria droplets into the air and onto surfaces, you touch these surfaces then your face, you ingest and you get sick.

Hotels clean bathrooms, right?

Wrong! Hotels ‘should’ adopt cross contamination prevention protocols when cleaning a hotel room, especially the bathroom. In simple terms, the cloth that is used to clean the toilet should not be used to clean the taps, mugs or glasses. The reality is, as we prove through our work on a daily basis, this is not the case as many housekeeping staff are poorly trained, poorly supervised and under time pressure to clean a room.

Put simply, the bathroom phone will either be covered in millions of bacteria because:

a) it is never cleaned; or

b) the cloth used to clean the toilet is also used to clean the phone.

Either way, you could get very sick by using the phone and not having a long hot soapy shower afterwards.

Hotel operators, get in contact for a full review of your housekeeping protocols and adherence to protocols.