The Weirdness of the Post-Pandemic Hotel Room
March 7, 2023
IS IT JUST ME, or is post-pandemic America a wobbly one? Superficially things appear normal, but every so often you find yourself tripping on something that isn’t quite right. Customer service levels, certainly, have slipped across the board. And though it’s easy to blame staffing shortages, you can’t deny that the world we’ve reassembled feels a little, well, lazier than the old one.
For those of us who travel a lot, these weak spots can be stubbornly annoying. I call these my Post-Pandemic Pet Peeves (PPPP, or P4s, for short). I’ve got quite a list, as goes my whiny nature, but today let’s focus on just two of them, both of which you’ll find in hotel rooms:
First is the disappearance of drinking glasses. For reasons that were never fully explained, cups and glasses were removed from most hotel rooms during COVID. Just as strangely, they were never put back.
In the old days, every hotel room on earth, from a suite at the Four Seasons to a $39 room at Motel 6, had a couple of cups or glasses on the bathroom vanity. Maybe they were crystal, maybe they were throw-aways wrapped in cellophane. No more. In the post-COVID world, guests who would dare brush their teeth are expected to stick their mouths under the faucet, or to slurp from cupped hands like savages.
If you’re lucky, you can scrounge a paper cup from the coffee maker, but even that’s no guarantee. And this has become normal not only in budget properties, but in five-star places as well. I was in a Hyatt recently. No glasses, anywhere. So I call the front desk, and the guy says, “Would you like us to bring you some?” Hell, why not skip the pillows and sheets as well? If guests want them, they can always call.
Is this one of those “supply chain issues” we keep hearing about, or something else? Of all the things.
No less infuriating, meanwhile, has become the preponderance of QR codes in place of paper menus.
I wanted room service in a hotel in Florida recently. When I couldn’t find a menu, I phoned reception and was told a QR code was available through the TV, on the guest services channel. After fumbling with the non-responsive television for several minutes, I found the code, which in turn told me I needed to download the hotel’s entire guest services app. After doing that, I needed to dig through page after page of different hotel locations until finding the one I was in, and then hunt down the restaurant menu. Hit the wrong arrow and whole application would bounce to the beginning.
Or, I could’ve picked up a paper menu from the desk and instantly had what I needed.
At a hotel in Spain, a QR code for room service instead kept directing me to a company in Malta that repaired boats. When I called downstairs, they sent someone up to slip a menu under the door. Maybe just have one in the room to start with?
QR mania is hardly particular to hotels, of course. Many dine-in restaurants have forsaken tradition and force their guests to participate in this barbaric task.
We don’t read menus anymore. We “navigate” them. “Where are the entrees?…. Wait, where did the starters go?… Was that an appetizer?… Is there a wine list in here?… Oh shit… No, go back to that first page… Those are the desserts… Did that come with anything?… Was that the one with calamari?… Hang on, I can’t find that veggie burger… What was that called?… Wait… ”
On an airplane, fine. At a take-out joint, sure. But for a serious dining establishment to ask its patrons to peck around on their phones is nothing if not rude.
I understand that menu items change and there are costs involved with re-printing, and so on. And I’m all for saving trees and reducing waste. But there are those situations, and this is one of them, where old-fashioned paper is the friendlier, more civilized, all-around better solution.
As maybe you already know, many restaurants have a secret inventory of paper menus for those irritating customers who insist. I am one of those customers. I was at a Thai place in Long Beach the other day, and asked for a “normal menu.” I use this phrasing intentionally. To say “paper” implies lesser or obsolete. “Normal” implies better. Which it is.
The look on the waiter’s face is one I won’t forget, but 90 seconds later, there it was: leather-bound, elegant and simple. Everyone at the table put their phones down, and we ordered the normal way.
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Hotel room photo by the author.
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33 Responses to “The Weirdness of the Post-Pandemic Hotel Room”
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I don’t mind electronic menus at all when they’re done right. Here in Japan there are plenty of restaurants where there’s a tablet at the table, with a menu that’s easy to navigate, you can add whatever you need to your order, and when you’ve got it all right, push the “send order” button. It works well.
But that is a pretty different world from, “figure out how to scan a QR code on your phone and then start installing apps” thing, which I would despise.
Oh Patrick you really hit it with this complaint. So true. Not even cheapo plastic cups wrapped in cheapo plastic wrap in the bathrooms?
What? Do I now have to bring a collapsing cup from Magellan’s travel catalogue? Or, go to the Boy Scout store in town.
Now the Da-n QR code. You said it perfectly.
The QR code thing is because, like every other retail business, hospitality has discovered the ability to steal personal information from their customers. Requiring one to download an app in order to do anything exposes one’s phone’s contents for stealing, and allows the business to track one wherever one goes. Stick to your guns and refuse to participate in this invasive trend.
Just say it- these hotels and restaurants are “cheaping out”. I wonder if the amount of money they save is more than the money they lose by jerking customers [x-customers?] around.
“…to slurp from cupped hands like savages.”
If the option is to open and use a plastic-wrapped plastic cup or slurp from my hands, then call me a savage. Are hands so bad? I wouldn’t be surprised if the last time you ate a sandwich for instance, you used your savage little hands too.
But I’m with you on the QR codes. I have a smartphone and can use it, but no way do I want to read a menu on it. A menu selection is a comparison activity, in which you need to glance back, and around, the menu, which translates to lots of scrolling on a phone. Yes, the restaurant has to print a piece of paper for me, but at least I’ve saved the hotel a plastic cup.
QR code experience last week at the Hilton Garden Inn Downtown in DC. The QR code, on a small display in the room, did open a webpage with several options such as “bell boy” or “room service menu”. Only none of the tiles were clickable or did anything. I tried reloading and even restarting my phone. I called the front desk but they never picked up the phone. I went downstairs and demonstrated the non-operative webpage of tiles. “It is supposed to take you to the app” the woman said, working extremely hard to care but I wasn’t feeling it. “I don’t know” she then offered, “but you can order your food at the bar and wait for it.” I ordered through Uber Eats from a very nice Thai restaurant.
Bravo! These aren’t whiny, they are legitimate complaints, and I echo them. It’s not unreasonable to expect a few glasses in a hotel room. They aren’t charging *less*, yet we’re expected to settle for less. Just like those grocery items that have less content or smaller sizes for the same or more money.
And I despise QR codes and have left places that insist I use them and won’t provide a NORMAL menu. I don’t have a smartypants phone anyway, so these Orwellian exercises are wasted on me. If they don’t want my business enough to provide a proper menu, then I won’t give it to them.
Like we’re saving the planet and its woodlands by not printing menus! Right.
I stayed at a no-name motel back in October 2020 and it was the cleanest hotel room I have ever seen in my life, including every 5-star hotel I’ve stayed at. Every surface was absolutely spotless and even the bed cover looked like it had been freshly washed. Last summer I spent three nights at a boutique hotel in Montreal and it was fine and came complete with glasses as should be expected in a civilized country like Canada. That said I agree that service is definitely worse than before and we are in this weird place where no-one has any money to spend, goods are in short supply, flights and hotels are overbooked and prices are sky-high. It’s like the pandemic accelerated the existing split in our society, tossing some middle-class folks up into upper-class land while pushing the rest of the middle class down into the lower classes.
With respect to QR codes I am fine with the codes themselves but what is on the other end of them should be better, not worse than a paper menu and certainly shouldn’t involve any sub-menus or navigation, everything should be clearly listed on the landing page.
If they really want to go digital, why not have a menu channel on the TV?
Channel 93 is your menu channel, Bonne apetit
QR codes are getting ridiculous in their usage, a fair number of people do not have ‘smart’ phones or want them, guess I’ll go out and chop down a cherry tree to do my part of the paper user group.
This is a post to which I would have liked to hit a “Like” button
I have not yet learned how to use these QR codes. And my doctor’s office sends me emails about checking in early for my appointment with my smartphone. I still don’t know how to do that.
As an old, retired person, I have other priorities to deal w
A thousand times YES. Recently at a nice hotel in LA – 1st room, air con not working. Move to next room – view/sound of the building next door’s exhaust fans. 3rd room – hey a room on a good floor with working air and a view of the hills AND glassware. We’ve stayed there maybe 10 times, perhaps next time give us that one first? And…only the high end people get glassware?
Since I have to take pills daily, I invested in a $8 collapsible metal cup (intended for camping) that just lives in my dop kit. I got tired of there not being a cup in a hotel room.
Can’t use the reply button either so I’ll keep this short. Sent a long email about hotels a year or so ago. In short, use small motels when possible. The service is good and the owner/staff are reachable and problems are rectified. Do a lot of traveling in Canada and the hotels there still believe in pre Covid service and amenities.
While I agree that being forced to read menus on phones is irritating at best and probably rude, they don’t do themselves (or their customers) any favors by making the menus hard to navigate. Fine to have navigation links at the top, but for &deity’s sake, give me the whole menu on one page, so I can search for stuff! All those “clever” collapsing submenus and (worse, and all too common) separate pages for stuff is just hell. “I got a shrimp thing here last time…now where the **** is it?” is a poor user experience.
As is all too often the case these days, “clever” designers do “clever” things without ever doing any user testing, with almost-unusable results. I despair.
Tried to reply to a couple of comments, but that doesn’t work.
But to echo what you and some commentators have said – Hotels have kept their high prices but have cut back service to the bone. Staying for a week? You’ll have to call for service, otherwise we’ll never touch your room. Need a restaurant at a 4 or 5 star hotel? Yeah, those are still closed, but you can order frozen pizza from room service for $38. There’s a conference at the hotel? We’ve still only staffed the front desk with two people, so we hope you enjoy the 35 minute line to check in at the end of your long day.
Makes me happy I’m not traveling so much any more.
QR codes is short for FUQR.
I used an online QR generator to create a QR for Patrick’s website, printed it like a sheet of stamps on adhesive back paper and affix them to everything. Solved.
Collapsible travel drinkware has been available in sporting goods stores, online and in nice airport shops for thousands of years. Solved.
A real business would consider its menu a marketing tool — one which encourages the user to spend more.
Even Amazon would have trouble making an “order more stuff” restaurant menu on a phone.
“it’s easy to blame staffing shortages”
Pardon my ignorance but can anyone explain this to me? For what reason are there, today, staffing shortages? Do people no longer have to eat or pay rent? Serious question — I really don’t get it.
Speaking of Spain, the first time I saw QR-code-only insanity was in a restaurant there last year. I explained that we were luddites & didn’t even Have smartphones (which I unaccountably pronounce “stupidphones”). So the proprietor had to recite the entire menu.
Back again two weeks ago, I was pleased to see they now had paper menus. 😉
QR menu codes permit the restaurant to easily change prices. Without paper menus they can change the prices as often as needed.
QR code menus are fine, as an option. And it should be really easy to get the paper version. Menus can be printed on recycled paper so as not to kill trees.
I think a lot of companies stopped doing certain things during the pandemic, then realized how much money they were saving, and have decided to continue to not offer these things.
They also figured out that people would quickly grow accustomed to these changes and simply accept them, even if they’re paying the same price (or more) for the same product.
I totally agree with you on the QR codes, Patrick. And to add insult to injury, here in Australia where we don’t need to tip the hotel/restaurant asks us to add a tip when placing our order!! So we can tip their staff for doing nothing more than delivering the food. Sorry, no.
I’ve always been curious, though, why/how American’s use a glass when brushing their teeth. Dip the toothbrush under the tap, brush away, splash a bit of water in your mouth using the toothbrush and rinse. Easy! No glass needed. Though I definitely need a hotel glass to drink my duty free Jack Daniels with. 🙂
“Normal menu” works. I like asking for a “proper menu.”
Every day I feel more and more like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was more documentary than fiction. Remember that the menus in the resturaunt scene appeared to be a 1985 interpretation of an iPad. One could see this as the inevitable outcome of the QR code menus. Instead of getting rid of the QR codes, have a stack of iPads that get handed out to customers with the exact same web page as the QR code link. Layers on layers of patches.
The other thing I’ve noticed is the lack of daily cleaning, at least at the room prices I pay. It has the advantage of keeping my $5 tipping to a minimum, but the soap size hasn’t increased, so more than a day’s stay means a trip to the front desk to track down more soap.
Despite making a living as a software engineer, I tend to agree with your thoughts on using QR codes and cell phones to read restaurant menus. The biggest problem I have is I feel like I’m trying to read what should be a large poster through a dark keyhole.
As a former restaurant owner and self professed geek, one might think that I’d defend QR codes for menus. In fact it’s a terrible misuse of the technology. Far from being a bother to put together, a menu is one of the first opportunities of a restaurant to make a good impression. Well run restaurants (at any price point or service style) know this already. So if all you can get is a QR code, be thankful that you have the opportunity to leave before you wasted your time and money on a poorly run establishment.
Are you a pilot?!
The thing that bothers me most about QR codes is that these venues say: “We openly exclude the part of the population who don’t have a smartphone – for financial, age or other reasons – or the people who don’t know how to handle it.”
And there are many more people like that than computer/tech geeks can imagine.
The numbers about smartphone use vastly understate the problem, because they include everyone who owns such a phone – irrespective of their ability to use it. Both my parents, for example, own one. But my Dad can use the birdsong app and make phone calls, my Mom can answer Skype calls when someone else has opened the app for her.
People like them feel more and more excluded from society.
Not even to speak of the poor, who can’t afford a smartphone or won’t get a phone contract with internet.
I agree with you, but in general I don’t like this argument because it marginalizes the issue as something that affects only older people. My opposition to QR menus has nothing to do with my tech literacy. I hate them because they’re lazy and clunky and undignified.
I’m with you on the QR menus… sheesh, yes, it’s a pain to print them out on cardstock and load them into those leather holders, but is running some off on ordinary copy paper really too much to ask? (Along with a note on those little QR signs that a printed copy is available on request.)
(And while I’m at it, boo on places that don’t have at least part of the table well-lit so you can actually read the menu… I’m lightly in middle-age at this point, and needing to get out reading glasses because the place is so dim, most people over 40 are doomed, is a pain.)