With up to 17 rooms to clean each shift, Fatima Amahmoud’s job at the Moxy hotel in downtown Boston sometimes feels impossible.
There was the time she found three days worth of blond dog fur clinging to the curtains, the bedspread and the carpet. She knew she wouldn’t finish in the 30 minutes she is supposed to spend on each room. The dog owner had declined daily room cleaning, an option that many hotels have encouraged as environmentally friendly but is a way for them to cut labor costs and cope with worker shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unionized housekeepers, however, have waged a fierce fight to restore automatic daily room cleaning at major hotel chains, saying they have been saddled with unmanageable workloads, or in many cases, fewer hours and a decline in income.
The dispute has become emblematic of the frustration over working conditions among hotel workers, who were put out of their jobs for months during pandemic shutdowns and returned to an industry grappling with chronic staffing shortages and evolving travel trends.
There are hotels that allow dogs in the rooms? I don’t see how that could work in the long run without requiring deposits that most people wouldn’t want to pay.
There is always pet fee for about $100 and I thought it’s for the extra cleaning. If the customer declined daily house keeping and kept the dog for a week in the room then they should be charged accordingly and not make the housekeepers clean it in the same amount of time as the other rooms.
People wanting or needing to travel with their dog just pay the extra fees and deposits.
Rooms without carpeting, and non-refundable pet fees. Vinyl flooring makes cleaning up after pets trivial. The only issue you have is soiling of upholstery and potential chewing. But if everyone pays a $100 per dog fee, only a subset of those dog owners will cause any issues so the good dogs subsidize the cost for the bad dogs.
The fee and deposits sound steep, until you compare them with the astronomical costs of dog boarding.
I have yet to see a pet friendly hotel with vinyl floors. It’s always been wall to wall carpeting.
Personally I am all in favor of hard floors dogs or not. I stayed In hotel recently that mops the floors after every stay and that seems preferable to carpet and a vacuum.
But oddly enough, it was not pet friendly. The last two i stayed in with carpet were though.
Huh, I’ve never seen a carpeted pet friendly room, for obvious reasons.
The replies make sense, and I should have realized. I guess I was thinking any deposit large enough to cover all the possibilities would be more than anyone would agree to, but I can see how it’s to both owner and guest’s advantage to make it work.
Usually a pet fee of $25 to $50.