readywhenyouare

In case you weren't aware, I live in Florida, Florida has a lot of sand. Sand is an abrasive material that doesn't play well with real wood. I take my shoes off as soon as I come in but the dogs track it and all other types of debris in. And I'm not going to make guests take their shoes off. So the wood floors don't hold their shine for long. Ceramic tile, which is in the kitchen, laundry room, and bathrooms, is much more resilient and easier to maintain than the wood floors. Carpet in the bedrooms and secondary rooms works fine too since it's of good material and maintained. I don't use cheap plastic crap vacuums that clog after the first use. My central vacuum will such the paint off the walls. No flooring is inherently nasty. Just people.

MissJ

And you prove my point. People and animals track in all kinds of things. If you are in charge of cleaning it, you do, but in a hotel you have no say over when or how something is cleaned.

bon mot

Which is why I always travel with a pair of suede, soft footbed Birkenstock clogs – they pack down nicely and feel great on my tired, end-of-the-day feet. They also double as non-slip slippers and make a quick trip to the lobby a breeze. As such, I don’t have to worry about the state of my hotel floors.

thebigben

There's a room type for everyone. Personally I do proactively choose rooms with hard floors of any kind to limit my allergies, so having options without carpets is really nice

GUWonder

I've spent a huge amount of time in hotels with carpeted floors in the guest rooms, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen equipment being used for deep cleaning hotel guest room carpets. I wouldn't be surprised if the hotels' desire to clean the room carpets very extensively dropped with higher occupancy levels.

In more recent years, it seems like even regular vacuum cleaning of hotel guest room carpets has become less frequent in the rooms than it used to be.

MSPeconomist

I tend to use an extra bath towel (from the hotel). The white reminds me of the white linen mats that some luxury hotels place next to the bed as part of their turndown service. It solves the problem of not wanting my bare feet to touch the floor or carpet when I'm trying to find the slippers. It also provides a good spot for changing clothes, again as I don't want my bare feet to touch the floor/carpet in a hotel.

IME a lot of beach resorts are uncarpeted. I love the dark wood floors (mahogany I believe) that I've seen in Australia and they surprisingly don't seem hot and heavy.

CDTraveler

There's a Best Western in Pennsylvania that's lucky I didn't sue them. The room had that hideous faux wood flooring and the housekeeper left puddles on it when she mopped. I slipped in one and went down hard, twisting an ankle and acquiring several large bruises.

I'd rather take my chances with grubby carpet. I grew up going barefoot 10 months out of the year, and don't worry too much about germs in carpet - my feet are washable.

GUWonder

Carpets are definitely not slippery like hard, non-carpeted floors.

Don't the more serious slips in hotel rooms usually have something to do with the hotel bathrooms? Most all of those hotel bathrooms nowadays are not carpeted, and I appreciate that they aren't carpeted.

DenverBrian

If you thought the trend to hard surface floors was popular in 2019, imagine a COVID and post-COVID world. I doubt there's a major chain that isn't considering all hard surface floors for all future renovations, now that we're in a world where daily housekeeping service has been strangled - and likely will be for good going forward.

FlyerTalker324193

I always felt carpets are less hygienic than hardwood or laminate. So I approve of this trend.

GUWonder

Carpets were often chosen to try to cover up how dirty the floor may be -- think stain-masking coloration/patterns for the carpets.

Do non-carpeted floors equate with housekeeping staff being able to more quickly make the room look clean? If so, it would have been inevitable that more and more hotels would migrate away from carpeted floors.

But there is one thing to be said for carpeted floors. Carpeted floors dampen noise more than hardwood floors.

Super Mario

I've definitely seen some gross carpets at Hotels, and probably would have found worse if I actually inspected it. Much easier to keep hardwood clean in a hotel.

For my home, I prefer carpet in the non-kitchen area. I don't want to live in a huge echo chamber.

GUWonder

Do any of the major US hotel groups have brands where the brand standard -- at least for new-builds -- forbid the use of carpets in the guest rooms?

CDTraveler

There's some major flaws in that scenario.

First, the chance of contracting COVID from the floor is minuscule if not downright impossible.

Second, a dirty hard surface shows the dirt much more than the same amount of dirt on carpet, and you can feel it underfoot. So in a reduced housekeeping world, why would hotels choose the surface that needs more cleaning to look equally clean? And will likely skyrocket the noise complaints?

DenverBrian

Some inaccurate assumptions here.

1) NO ONE is putting "hardwood" into hotel rooms, unless it's a very high end resort. The flooring of choice these days is so-called luxury vinyl plank, otherwise known as...vinyl plank. It doesn't stain, cleans like you'd mop a linoleum floor, has texture enough to mimic wood, and if a single strip gets damaged, it can be replaced easily. That kind of hard surface IN NO WAY "shows the dirt."

2) Most carpet stains come from liquid spills. LVP is waterproof. Wipe it up. You're done.

3) Most LVP comes with a softening underlayment that will reduce noise. Possibly not to the extent that carpet does, but most noise transmission up/down in hotel rooms comes from either a creaking subfloor or absolute stomping/clomping from above. Even carpet doesn't handle a 10-year-old stomping across the floor.

4) While the real science may be that COVID isn't transmitted from surfaces, there is a general "ew, ick" factor among germophobic Millennials that was moving people towards "sanitary" long before COVID arrived. Just check out the numbers of FTers who proudly wrote about how they brought boxes of wipes on the plane pre-COVID to wipe down everything they might touch. Germs! Ack! In this case, hotels are marketing to people's perceptions as much as they are to reality.