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Is Daily Housekeeping at Hotels Really a Thing of the Past?

After pandemic, cleaning frequency often depends on length of stay and the brand

a housekeeper at a hotel holding fresh towels
Need fresh towels in your hotel room daily? It’s best to clarify a property’s cleaning policy when you check in.
Getty Images
By

Terry Ward,

 
AARP
Published July 24, 2023

Pick a person, any person, who’s stayed in a hotel for a few nights in recent weeks or months across the United States. Ask them if their room was cleaned during their stay — and how deeply — and if it happened on a daily basis.

Chances are, the answers will vary across the board — and across the luxury level of the stay in question. 

During the pandemic years, travelers got used to housekeeping taking a pass on daily room cleanings, all the better to keep from introducing bodies and bacteria into a hotel guest’s intimate quarters, so went the thinking. 

If it’s been a while since you stayed in a hotel, you might wonder whether things have rebounded to pre-pandemic norms when it comes to hotel room cleaning services. 

The answer, it turns out, lies somewhere in the gray.

Daily room cleaning only comes into play when a guest is staying multiple nights, says Curt Cashour, an American Hotel & Lodging Association spokesperson. Nearly two-thirds of hotel stays (64 percent) are for a single night, according to an analysis for AHLA by Kalibri Labs, a data company for the hotel industry.

Hotel type often determines cleaning level

Digging deeper, whether your hotel room will receive a daily cleaning during your stay varies depending on the type of hotel, says Jason Reader, executive vice president of operations for Remington Hospitality, a hotel management company with 26 hotel brands in its portfolio, across 30 states and Washington, D.C.

“If you’re staying at a resort or luxury hotel, really nothing has changed since before the pandemic,” he says. “There’s still daily cleaning service. Everything is the way it was before. You don’t have to ask for your room to be cleaned, it will happen automatically as it did before.” 

Expectations get fuzzier at mid-scale and independent hotels, Reader says. 

If you’re staying more than one night in a branded hotel (think Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, etc., although not at the luxury level), “there is a cleaning that should take place,” Reader says, “but it’s likely not as intensive as it was before [the pandemic]. 

“For branded hotels, we tend to follow the policy of the brand,” Reader says about the cleaning protocols.  

At those properties for guests staying more than one night, cleaning might look more like a “tidying” on the second or third day of your stay, he says. It includes emptying the trash, vacuuming and making the beds, as opposed to the deeper clean that occurs when you check out of a hotel room.

When you’re staying at independently owned hotels, Reader says, the cleaning policy varies. 

Guests can ask for additional cleaning

Tracy Ripa, senior vice president, franchise operations for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, tells AARP that the brand’s standards require rooms to be cleaned every third day. “And we’re happy to accommodate a more frequent schedule when guest requests are made,” she says. “This flexibility helps meet guest needs and helps to ensure that their stay with Wyndham is a positive experience.”

Frequent traveler Gary Leff, 48, of the travel blog View from the Wing, who spends roughly 100 nights per year in hotels (a mix of Westin, Hyatt Regency and Hyatt Place hotels, predominantly), says that in general, travelers should expect less by way of daily housekeeping at hotels now than was the norm before the pandemic.

“Luxury properties have maintained it, it’s part of their service offering and how they differentiate themselves to earn a revenue premium,” Leff says. “However, we’ve seen cutbacks at hotels beneath that level, both in full service and limited service.”

Though some hotels will clean your room automatically, you have to request it at other properties, Leff says. 

“Making the default no servicing of rooms unless you request it means less servicing of rooms, and fewer housekeeping labor hours for a hotel to pay for,” Leff explains.

“Each cost imposed on the guest to get housekeeping makes the request less likely,” Leff says.

Leora Halpern Lanz, associate professor of the practice and assistant dean at the Boston University’ School of Hospitality Administration, says the trend to scale back on daily cleaning services, such as replacing towels, actually started before the pandemic. 

“We saw a lot of hotels saying, ‘If we don’t have to replace your towels every day, hang them up,’ ” she says. “That trend started before the pandemic, but the pandemic did accelerate it.” 

Lanz says, “It shouldn’t be a surprise to see hotels saying, ‘Hey, we’d like to offer the option to not have turndown or housekeeping service every day.’ ... Now, naturally, it’s for other reasons — not just sustainability, of course, but the trend was already there.”

If you’d prefer to know what you’re getting into ahead of time, Lanz recommends considering the type of trip you’re taking and asking yourself what kind of services you really need.

Check hotel cleaning policies

If daily room cleaning is important to you during your next hotel stay, you might want to clarify the property’s cleaning policies when booking or at check-in. 

“When they’re telling you what time breakfast is and doing the initial dialog, just say you’d like your room cleaned every day,” Reader suggests. And if you don’t want cleaning, he says, that’s a good time to mention it, too. 

Anecdotally, he’s noticed not all guests are as into daily housekeeping as they were before the pandemic. 

“Post-pandemic, you can walk down the hallway of a hotel and see a lot more Do Not Disturb signs on doors,” he says. “A lot more guests are using Do Not Disturb signs than they used to. If I’m traveling for business, I always put it on.” 

Cashour of AHLA agrees. “To this day, many guests don’t want hotel staff coming into their room during their stay.”

Of course, at resorts where families are traveling with kids, Reader says, guests are more likely to want that daily cleaning.

Wei Chang, 42, of San Jose, California, who estimates he spends 70 to 80 nights per year in hotels, says when he wants housekeeping to be performed on a daily basis and a hotel doesn’t seem “keen on acknowledging” it, he’ll write out his preferences and present them at check-in. 

“For the most part in the last 1½ years, I haven’t had an issue with that at hotels of all price ranges, except for a few sporadic oddball incidents,” Chang says.

At Marriott properties, cleaning varies across brands, according to Marriott’s Housekeeping Model for Housekeeping Stayover Services. Luxury hotels and resorts under the Marriott umbrella offer full cleaning daily, while select and extended-stay hotels offer service every other day of a stay. Premium hotels, which fall in between the two, offer a light daily cleaning, according to a Marriott International spokesperson.

“How often housekeeping service is provided varies by hotel segment, and guests may personalize their housekeeping preferences during the booking process,” according to a statement Marriott International sent to AARP. 

For travelers who still relish the idea of their room getting cleaned daily, hope may be on the horizon, Leff says. 

“Housekeeping is on the upswing, even though it hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic service offerings,” he says. Leff has noticed it’s more prevalent at hotels now than a year ago. “While hotels have tried to retain their cost-cutting ethos of the pandemic in order to grow margins, more hotels are offering it now than they were.”

Being prepared can help you manage expectations — wherever and however you travel, Lanz says. 

“People are living for travel experiences today, but we really need to do our homework before we have expectations and get disappointed by them,” she says. “With travel today, you need to be informed.”

Terry Ward is a longtime travel writer who has lived in Australia, New Zealand and France. She’s now based in Tampa, Florida, and has cruised to the Bahamas with her family from Miami and Port Canaveral.

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