Whatever happened to a 'Clean Stay'?

The next time to walk down a hotel corridor take a look at the housekeeper trolley and if it looks like this, turn round and head to the reception and check out, as if you stay you may get very very ill.

Look at the picture and ask yourself would you clean your teeth in faecal infested toilet water?

As we slowly emerge out of COVID -19, it would be nice think that hotels have learned a few lessons on how to keep their properties clean. Think again. On virtually EVERY hotel visit we make (pre, during and emerging out of COVID-19), housekeepers are poorly trained, unmanaged and ignore the basic principle of separation.

Now, you may be thinking what's wrong with what you see in the picture (taken 17 June 2022 at a major brand hotel at Heathrow airport who has just dropped their COVID-19 cleaning protocols).

Back to Basics: Standard industry cleaning protocols specify that a red cloth is used to clean high risk areas such as toilets and urinals whilst the yellow cloth is used to clean bathroom sinks and taps. Meanwhile the green cloth is used for cleaning food preparation areas such as kitchens. Finally the red buckets signifies that everything within is high risk

The issue: The toilet cloth (red) and the cloth used to clean sinks and taps (yellow) are both stuffed into the toilet brush container.... you can just see the toilet brush sticking out. The kitchen cloth is draped over the edge of the toilet bucket next to the toilet cleaner. Bacteria from the toilet brush, cloth and bucket will now be all over the bathroom and kitchen cloth, ready for the housekeeper to contaminate any surface that the cloth touches.

So what's the problem: Hotels should have strict cleaning protocols in place to ensure that bacteria found in the toilet and other high risk areas do not get cross contaminated onto any other cloth. You can be 100% sure that the yellow cloth used to clean the sink and taps in the next room is contaminated with a host of bacteria including E. coli, Shigella Bacteria, Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Influenza, Norovirus plus many more. These bacteria are known to cause serious illness.

Hotel operators typically use third party contractors to clean their property and have little or no understanding about the intricacies of cleaning leading to contractors having no regard to the health and welfare of guests.

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