Hotels And Solo Travellers

[bomoRamos]

Hello Im new,

Does anyone find the treatment from hotels much different as a solo traveller?

When I travel with my wife, I always get put in good rooms, next to other couples, which is frustrating as I can never listen with ear to wall while she is around.

But then I'm solo, I have the chance to listen as much as I want, what do I get? Other singles next door or in todays case, the doors have lots of rubber insulation, but the walls are thin like paper, so I get put with no neighbors either side of me, but I see a couple walk past through the peep hole and go check into a room 2 doors down.

I walked outside there room which is at the end of the hall and can barely hear anything from them talking.

Either I am very unlucky when Im solo, or they have specific ways they group couples/single travellers etc.

[reggind]

That always seems to be my luck too. I wonder if you tell them you wife is coming and can they have a key ready for her? If that would help. I may try that next time I travel, which may be never with the damn virus.

[Road2021]

I found that while travelling alone, hotels typically stick families and children in certain parts of the hotel.....and maybe solo, couple travelers in other sections.

Although, that's just an observation.

[sndprv]

Does anyone find the treatment from hotels much different as a solo traveller?

Yes, my personal experience is that, whenever I stay somewhere in the UK outside London, some
hotel receptionists - especially the female ones - are particularly curious when they realise I'm
not local (because of my London accent). This has even happened when I visited big towns/cities,
e.g. Birmingham. I'll probably check in wearing work clothing if I decide to do any hotel recordings
in the future, so that it's obvious to them that I'm staying in the area for 'work purposes'. If the
nosey female ones start asking me what I do for a living, I'll probably say that I work in 'waste disposal'
or that I'm a 'sewage worker', or some other stinky job, which should immediately quell the interest
of the deluded Instasham/Facefuck/Twatter-addicted types.

I've even had women receptionists take a fancy to me while staying in hotels before or after long walks
in the hills (and more generally as a tourist). Not sure why. I think the idea of an adventurous, mysterious,
fit-looking (for his age) lone male must excite some of them []. I mean, the Greek one that squeezed my waist
(whom I never met before in my life), I took as a sign that she was interested...although all I cared about at the
time was re-hydration, food, rest and sleep - especially since my feet had suffered an absolute battering
following the two-day walk I did up on the hills of eastern Crete at the height of the summer. I also had a long
conversation with a Scottish one once, which almost felt like a date, but I was already in a relationship at the
time, so I had to tell her 'how the land lay', so to speak. But why would a woman show an interest in a guy
who lives 350 miles away or in another country altogether, anyway? I dunno. I've never fully understood
female psychology...

Either I am very unlucky when Im solo, or they have specific ways they group couples/single travellers etc.

It's mostly to do with the building plan of the hotel and, yes, luck. Let me explain.

1. 'Single rooms' in the older hotels tend to be grouped together because that's how the building was
designed in the first place - and some may have been converted into hotels from something else.
However, over the past 15-20 years, the major UK budget hotel chains don't bother building hotels
with 'single rooms' any more. They consist of 'double rooms', 'family rooms' and a few rooms for
disabled guests. They've done this to maximize revenue. If you have, say, just single rooms left
vacant in a hotel on a particular night, but you have couples wanting to book a room for the night,
then, obviously, those single rooms are going to remain vacant, so the hotel has lost customers.
Thus, you might as well not have any single rooms and just put lone guests in double rooms.
The design plans of these new hotels tend to place family rooms in specific areas of the hotel, e.g.
there could be a series of family rooms on one side (or both sides) of a particular corridor on
each floor.

2. The automatic room allocation program, within the hotel's booking system software, that a hotel staff member has to
run each morning, generally only looks for the room type each guest has booked - it doesn't really care about anything else.
So, yes, which room you get really does depend on 'luck', because it is almost randomly allocated to you by the program.
However, on the other hand, a keen receptionist, in order to minimize complaints, improve customer service, and
to make the day go smoother, might decide to manually allocate the rooms to each guest. They would do this by finding
identical surnames in the bookings and placing those guests in rooms on the same floor and within close proximity to
each other, because they could be part of the same family. Sometimes the booking info will show the name of a
company that has booked rooms for several of its employees, and the receptionist will do the same for them.

You don't have to stay in the room that's been allocated to you. You can tell them that you want one
on another floor during check-in, if you want. There is nothing suspicious about saying, "can I have a room on the
fifth floor instead of the first, please?" You can just tell them you want a room higher up from the road, because
it will be quieter.

[edtraveller]

Does anyone find the treatment from hotels much different as a solo traveller?

If the
nosey female ones start asking me what I do for a living, I'll probably say that I work in 'waste disposal'
or that I'm a 'sewage worker', or some other stinky job, which should immediately quell the interest
of the deluded Instasham/Facefuck/Twatter-addicted types.

[sndprv]

^I know what someone out there's thinking:

"that's a bit rich calling them 'nosey' when you're in there to record intimate details
of people's sex lives!"

[edtraveller]

There's worse.. people trying to blackmail or identify theft. Our peculiarity though annoying to some is far less harmful in the end..

[sndprv]

^Yep, true. I could share all kinds of horror stories about my times working in hotels.
Here are just a few:

* Dealing with drunks, weed-smokers, and credit card fraudsters trying to scam rooms, were a regular occurrence.
* I've been spat on the face by a guest.
* I've had to fight off an attacker and physically throw him out of the hotel myself, even after calling the police.
* A former multi-millionaire guest, who ended up drug-addicted with nothing and committed suicide.
* A young guy with a criminal past, who jumped out of a third floor window, fell and cracked his head open while
being chased by cops.

All that for minimum wage, eh?