12 year old thread? You must have been really itching to tell us that.

With this being your first post, and in grand resurrection style to boot, Welcome to FT!

First, welcome to Flyer Talk.

Secondly, it is considered very bad form to bump such an old thread. Information posted so long ago is quite likely out-of-date and misleading. Better to start a new thread if you wish to post on the same subject.

This has always seemed counterproductive to me. I'm on other boards where starting new threads that are duplicates of existing ones is frowned upon.

The answer is simple and someone already hit upon it upthread: a lot of hotel rooms are designed to fit either 1 king with two nightstands or two doubles with one nightstand. Two queens would not comfortably fit.

Newer builds are often better. We travel with two teenagers and look for 2-queen + sofabed rooms. Newer Spring Hill Suites have them. Newer HIX's often have them (we're sometimes talking rural stays where HIX is a "good" choice). Older full-service city hotels often don't.

It's interesting to resurrect this old thread to compare experiences then & now. Over the past several years I've found, in the US, that when a hotel advertises "2 queens", it regularly is 2 queens. In fact, rooms advertised with "2 doubles" are often also 2 queens. Of course, some hotels really do have double beds -- and advertise them as such.

As for why provide 2 doubles instead of 2 queens, the answer is simple economics. A 2-double layout takes less space than 2 queens, so the rooms can be slightly smaller. And, of course, the beds are cheaper. The difference may seem minor to a consumer buying one bed every 10 years, but to a franchise operator furnishing 100s of beds per property it adds up.

Ha! It's nice to see my old thread again. I do agree with Darthbimmer that the availability of "2 queen" rooms in the USA has increased in the past decade. But there are still many hotels that offer 2 double beds instead. It is still very annoying if you actually have 4 people sharing the room -- the occupancy limit may be 4, but the comfort limit is definitely less!

Unless it is parents sharing with two children, I don't think most hotels want to encourage 4 people to share a room (as evidenced by the extra charges if there are more than 2 people). So, they make it technically possible for the real cheapskates, but they're not going to make it comfortable. And they're not going to pay more for larger beds and bedding just to attract this crowd. I don't think the double or queen are really meant to be shared (that's what the king rooms are for). The other rooms are designed to allow two people (friends, relatives, co-workers) to each have their own bed. This also gives the hotel flexibility since many couples (except maybe newlyweds) have no preference between sharing a king or each having a separate bed.

But for many older hotels, there are also space concerns, especially if they were built before queen beds were so common.

A large portion of the legacy-Marriott portfolio would handle (and price) 4 to a room with no problem. Hilton and Starwood were always more hit-and-miss, even in regions where hotel rooms are usually large and 2-double rooms are the norm. I haven't done many queries to figure out how Starwoods are pricing in the Marriott booking engine - I'm staying away until they get their systems working again.

Since there are often 4 of us, but the kids want their own beds (one being a sofabed), I often start hotel searches with 5 adults to a room. That is a quick filter, even for a large city with 50+ Marriotts, to a small number of properties. I find the room I want, and then set it back to 2 adults and 2 kids.

The cities where this doesn't work (many in Europe, for example), we tend to book apartments from Booking.com instead of Marriotts/Hiltons to begin with.

The JW Marriott in San Antonio, which has an attached water park and caters to families only has two double beds in the room. These rooms are huge and could easily fit two queens. We always end up getting two rooms because it is just too crowded in a double bed. Even Disney is moving to Q/Q in their value resorts. They make it work with this ingenious set up. The rooms formerly only had 2 doubles.

https://wdwnt.com/2017/06/photos-new...entury-resort/

oh good lord we are talking about a bed not a chevy sedan. It's 12 years not 40.

I like the Murphy bed idea and have seen it in a couple of other hotels. I'm surprised they aren't used more often.

The Westin Kansas City has (or had, anyway) little Murphy rooms. Perhaps they were originally there with the idea that they'd get booked as day-use rooms or something, but we'd do a stay or two there each year where I'd always get an offer to add one on to my regular booking for an extra $40. With 2 small kids at the time, it was an easy call. It was a little odd-shaped room at the end of the hall that adjoined to a regular room in addition to having its own door to the hallway.

The Murphy itself was more comfortable than a typical sofabed. It was a double.

Only reason I can think of why there aren't more of them is that it's probably more difficult construction-wise and it's cheaper to just put in sofabeds. While sofabeds almost universally suck, nobody notices that until it's 10PM and you're trying to fall asleep in one.

Yeah, it's OK to put a 6 year old on a sofa bed, but I don't think too many teenagers are going to appreciate it. I'm particularly amused when a hotel lists a room's occupancy as 4 when 2 of those guests are supposed to be sharing a sofa bed.

Murphy beds are so much of a better solution. But I suspect they will remain rare due to increased cost.

I seen a few Ritz Carlton have double beds! It does sway me to find two queens over two doubles

It could be worse. One time I stayed in a hostel in NYC with one twin bed and a shared bathroom down the hall. The upside was that it was really cheap.