More things holiday hotels still get wrong

NORAJOHNSON BREAKING

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suspenseandcrimethrillersandafreelancejournalist.

GOOD morning, class. No talking at the back, please. I’d like to begin with another few moans about things holiday hotels still get wrong. Let me take you on a journey through the last one I encountered!

1. Check in. The room is rarely available for check in at the promised time and certainly never earlier. 2. Sockets ­ inconvenient placement of electric sockets needed for charging phones or other devices. 3. There’s rarely a well­lit mirror and plug so you can blow dry your hair and put on make­up. 4. Showers ­ why do I need a degree in engineering to work them? 5. Room lights ­ ridiculous lighting systems where there are lots of lights but none in the right place plus you get into bed and can’t find out how to turn the whole lot off. 6. Shower screens/curtains that don’t keep all the water in the bath/shower. 7. Lack of towel hanging space (yes, they want to ‘save the planet’). 8. Duvets designed for arctic con­ ditions, especially when it’s virtually impossible to adjust the heating/air conditioning. I often end up taking the duvet out of its cover or using the bed cover instead. 9. Room doors that won’t stay open while you’re attempting to get all your luggage in or out. Those same doors with little sound insulation so you’re woken at 4am when the party crowd roll back in loudly discussing their evening as they stumble through the deserted corridors. Plus paperthin walls, made worse by connecting doors so you can hear your neighbours’ every cough, sneeze, snore and more (oops!). 10. It’d be nice to have a painting that slides over that ‘flat screen’ so that you don’t have to see it all the time.

Additionally, room service menus consisting only of overpriced stodge drowning in fat, cheese or cream, apart from maybe one or two token veggie items that sound totally unappetising. Try sticking to a postChristmas diet on that lot...

Finally, I encountered one hotel bathroom in Chicago that had been designed to within an inch of its life by a woman who’d apparently never been in a bathroom used by a man. I say a woman, because there was a well­lit area where you could sit to put on make­up. However, if you were a man who wanted to shave, good luck find­ ing a shelf more than two inches wide to put anything on. It was a really large roomwith the towel rail on the opposite side from the shower!

In general, I’ve never been in a hotel room where the lighting even approached adequacy. Always too dim and, as already mentioned, in the wrong place. I remember seeing a complaint about this in a UK chain, and the management response was: '’want our guests to have a relaxing time, blah, blah, blah...’

But if the guest’s idea of relaxation is to do needlepoint in the radiance of 10,000 suns, and then drops the needle with not enough light to find it again before stabbing themselves, what then? Sue the hotel? Or would they say you shouldn’t be embroidering?

You can’t win!

Nora Johnson’s 11 critically acclaimed psychological crime thrillers (www.norajohnson.net) all available online including eBooks (€0.99; £0.99), Apple Books, audiobooks, paperbacks at Amazon etc. Profits to Cudeca cancer charity.