odd – Page 6 – Pickpocket Bob Arno

Hotel oddity #11

What could be the purpose of a motion-detector inside a hotel room? Is this a new trend?

This one, in our room at the new Mandarin Oriental in Barcelona, blinked madly whenever we moved. It was a little creepy. I looked around for a hidden video camera.

When I asked reception staff, they explained that the motion sensor allowed them to determine occupancy in case of an emergency. This didn’t make sense to me; an occupant could be incapacitated, overcome by smoke in a fire, for example, or knocked unconscious in an earthquake.

I wrote the hotel, and its Director of Engineering & Loss Prevention replied promptly:

The motion sensor is part of the Inncom-Clipsal guestroom comfort system.
When the guest leaves the guestroom after 20 minutes inactivity the system goes to lighting off and A/C to set point.
When the guest enter in the guestroom the motion sensor activates all lighting memory scenario and A/C to last selected temperature.

That makes sense. And it explains my earlier post, too. In fact, I received two interesting explanations simultaneously. The Mandarin Oriental’s, and a comment from Tom. Tom has a different theory, but added “you’d probably hear claims of being able to report occupancy to firefighters, emergency responders, etc.” Which is exactly what I first heard.

Until they become commonplace (if they do), it’s probably not a bad idea for hotels using these gizmos to post a little note in the room explaining the purpose of them, given the intrusive sense of spying the observant but uninformed guest might feel. On the other hand, the proliferation of notes and commandments in hotel rooms has been irritating me lately. “Watch your step,” “test water temperature,” “towels on the floor,” even pictures of items not to be flushed.

The Mandarin Oriental in Barcelona is a spiffy joint, I might add, in an excellent location.

Hotel Oddity #10

What is this? Anyone have a clue? It was mounted on the inside of our Westin Hotel room door.

I know, I could have asked hotel management. But you know—you check in late, catch an early flight the next morning… There’s not always time to satisfy curiosity.

hotel odd

Hotel Oddity #9

I don’t think a plugged-up hotel bathtub or sink is terribly odd. The number of them we run into though, is. Why doesn’t housekeeping discover them? Shouldn’t they realize that a slow or stopped-up drain needs fixing before a guest arrives? This was the only flaw in our otherwise excellent Paris hotel. It was fixed right away.

Breakfast, I might add, was superb. Shall I name the place? Why not. It was the Holiday Inn Bastille—the joint beside the sex shop.

TV remotes with low or dead batteries, and missing lightbulbs, fall into the same category as slow drains. We run into these as well. Little irritations when you’ve traveled far, maybe checked in late, or early after an overnight flight. Sloppy. Shouldn’t happen in a decent hotel.

hotel odd

Hotel oddity #8

Ever stay in a hotel that tried to make you feel guilty about using the amenities? The beautiful Excel Hotel Tokyu at Tokyo’s Haneda airport pushes hard against guests’ heartstrings with all the hot-button words: forests, children, money, save, environment.

In order to help the global environment, we have implemented our “Green Coin” program. We are asking our guests to return “Green Coin”, which is attached to this card, to the front desk when the amenities in your room have not been used.

Our “Green Coin” will hopefully decreases the amount of disposable amenities used in all Tokyu Hotels.

The more coins we are able to collect from our guests, the more money we will donate to the OISCA Foundation’s “Children’s Forests” program and “Tokyu Hotels Green Coin Forests.

Am I bad if I shampoo my hair?

hotel odd

Hotel Oddity #7

What’s that spray bottle hanging in the closet of our Tokyo hotel room? It wears a gold necklace from which its explanation dangles.

“Resesh” is a fabric freshener with green tea to remove unpleasant odors from your room and clothes.

Sniff, sniff…Â does my room stink?

Refresh with Resesh.

Uh…no thanks.

hotel odd

Hotel oddity #6

The useless chain latch in my room at Miami's Radisson Mart Plaza Hotel.

See anything wrong with the chain lock on this door at Miami’s Radisson Mart Plaza Hotel? It’s mounted backwards! Upside-down. It’s useless this way and, worse, gives a false sense of security. Another serious security risk.

Do all the rooms have useless chain latches, or only our room, 612? A polite letter to management brought only a generic “We appreciate your recent message.”

hotel key odd Security

What are bed bugs doing in hotel rooms?

Credit: Rickard Ignell/Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Traumatic insemination is worth mentioning as a follow up to my post on bed bugs in hotels. Male bed bugs, ScienceNews reports, “ignore the opening to the female reproductive tract and inject sperm with a needlelike appendage directly through the outer covering of a mate’s body.” Yikes!

The report also explains that the male insects will happily mate with well-fed individuals of either sex until an accosted male sends out a special pheromone causing the aggressor to back off.

The pheromone can actually be detected by humans. It smells

a bit like almond, but not particularly pleasant. “Older people say that you used to be able to tell whose house had bed bugs because it had a peculiar smell.”

3/11/17: Edited to add a great resource, more than you ever wanted to know about bed bugs, on the site of nonprofit org Tuck, which is devoted to sleep.

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Hotel oddity #5

If your room number is printed on your key, complain.

The Hilton Tokyo-Bay, aka Japan’s Disneyland Hilton, was shockingly behind the times when we visited. Our paper electronic room keys had our room number printed right on them, instead of on an envelope. That’s a serious security risk. This was two years ago. Anyone know what their keys look like today?

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Hotel Oddity #4

We checked into a hotel last month and plodded through the tedious check-in procedure in a daze. It was a Millennium Hotel, but I won’t say in what city.

I liked our room right away because it had an open window. Then I thought: isn’t it strange that the window is already open? And the tv was on and tuned to CNN—also unusual. It wasn’t until all our bags were settled in that I noticed a man’s jacket sprawled on a chair. The room was already occupied.

I tried calling the front desk, but in ten minutes of trying, they never picked up the phone. Then I noticed that the room number printed on the phone didn’t match the number of the room I was in. Sloppy.

Bob took the elevator down to the lobby, leaving me alone in the room to face the jacket-man when he returned, or emerged from under the bed. We changed rooms without incident—just inconvenience.

Who's jacket is in my hotel room? Or, whose room am I in?

I wonder now how many times other people have entered our various hotel rooms while we’ve been out. It happened once while we were in—in bed. It was in Paris. Two men entered our room in the dead of night. Luckily, we woke up and Bob dramatically commanded them to get out. “Pardon,” they said, “c’est une erreur,” it is a mistake. The strange thing was that they had been standing there whispering for a moment. If it had truly been a mistake, wouldn’t they immediately back out of an occupied room?

How are hotel rooms assigned to multiple parties? The most basic computer system shouldn’t allow it.

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Hotel oddity #3

On the wall under the shower head, three feet above the floor, this pipe drained water after every shower. Not one of the nicer rooms we’ve stayed in, so I won’t name the place.

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