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Robotics Businesses

Hotels Say Goodbye To Daily Room Cleanings and Hello To Robots as Workers Stay Scarce (npr.org) 159

Posted by msmash from the times,-they-are-a-changin' dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: This holiday season at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, Merle Ayers is feeling especially grateful for the Whiz. At two feet tall and 66 pounds, the powerful robot vacuum doesn't mind working late into the night after the parties are over. The Whiz doesn't care that it's the holidays. It doesn't even need a day off. "It just needs to be cared for. We have to change the vacuum bags periodically and keep the batteries charged," says Ayers, the hotel's director of banquets. Amid ongoing staffing shortages, the two robot vacuums the hotel purchased late last year for about $30,000 each are proving their worth many times over, filling gaps in both the catering department and housekeeping.

"If we vacuum every floor with a robot, that saves one whole shift," says Garden City Hotel managing director Grady Colin. "That's one whole person per day that can be redeployed to do something else." These days, he'll take all the help he can get. Travelers have returned from the pandemic, but hotel workers have not, creating unprecedented staffing challenges for the hospitality industry. According to the Labor Department, there are 350,000 fewer people working in hotels today than there were in February 2020, before the pandemic. It's not for lack of trying. Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen. "I've been in the hotel business for a long time," says Colin. "I've never seen anything like this."
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Hotels Say Goodbye To Daily Room Cleanings and Hello To Robots as Workers Stay Scarce More

Hotels Say Goodbye To Daily Room Cleanings and Hello To Robots as Workers Stay Scarce

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  • 25% compared to three years ago is just inflation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Generic User Account ( 6782004 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @07:37AM (#63154672)

    So the pay is as shitty as ever and people wonder why those who were forced to find other employment aren't coming back.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      I find that a lot of employers probably know their offerings are shit but they still cling to the hope that the workers won't notice.

      It takes sleeping beauty some time to wake up...

      I've been on the job hunt twice this year. As a senior IT specialist, I found that I don't get as many offers thrown at me as some more prestigious position might (like security or dev) but the need for my skills is very solid.
      The interesting thing I noticed was that companies will proudly present their benefits, often be absolut

      • I find that a lot of employers probably know their offerings are shit but they still cling to the hope that the workers won't notice.

        It takes sleeping beauty some time to wake up...

        I've been on the job hunt twice this year. As a senior IT specialist, I found that I don't get as many offers thrown at me as some more prestigious position might (like security or dev) but the need for my skills is very solid. The interesting thing I noticed was that companies will proudly present their benefits, often be absolutely average and act very surprised when you don't jump for joy.

        Gotta disclaimer this as being the situation in Switzerland... Can't speak for other countries and profession but I have a feeling that it's probably not just anecdotal...

        There is a spectrum of people, who have a spectrum of drive and abilities.

        There is a spectrum of jobs/careers as to difficulty/responsibility, and pay.

        And there is automation. Yes, employers are having a bit of a time finding applicants for some of the low level jobs, and are replacing them with robots when possible. This may or may not be that great a thing for the people who used to have work doing the room cleaning. It depends on what the people who had previous employ there are doing now. If they

    • Business has betrayed peoples trust (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rapjr ( 732628 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @08:15AM (#63154702)
      People were abandoned by their employers when things got tough, and they will never trust those businesses again. It is one thing to be fired when other jobs are available, but being thrown onto the street when ALL the jobs are gone is frightening, and those people are never going to come back. It is a basic survival instinct, if someone betrays you, you never trust them again, it is in our genetic structure. Those betrayed people are not coming back at any price, or even if they are forced to they will always be looking both for revenge and for a job somewhere else. It is human nature. I predict that any service industry that fired people during the worst of the pandemic is not going to find workers for the next decade or so.

      • Re:Business has betrayed peoples trust (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @09:21AM (#63154804)

        People were abandoned by their employers when things got tough, and they will never trust those businesses again. It is one thing to be fired when other jobs are available, but being thrown onto the street when ALL the jobs are gone is frightening, and those people are never going to come back. It is a basic survival instinct, if someone betrays you, you never trust them again, it is in our genetic structure. Those betrayed people are not coming back at any price, or even if they are forced to they will always be looking both for revenge and for a job somewhere else. It is human nature. I predict that any service industry that fired people during the worst of the pandemic is not going to find workers for the next decade or so.

        It's more along the lines of people found better jobs after being laid off from hospitality and aren't in a rush to drop their less stressful and often better paying jobs to rush back to dealing with the arseholes in hospitality (both the employers and the customers, folks, always be nice to your hotel staff).

    • Re:25% compared to three years ago is just inflati (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NCsunset ( 10099846 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @10:36AM (#63154904)
      I want to offer a counter-narrative to this story. I work for a SMB regional food manufacturing company. We are a high volume, low profit business. Everything we do is weighed based on the bottom line because our profit margins are incredibly narrow. Profit is MUCH less than 1%. For the last three years since Covid started, our profit is in the neighborhood of 0.20%. Let me clarify that because I don't want anyone to misunderstand: for every dollar of revenue that comes in, shareholders earn 0.2 pennies on it. This isn't uncommon in our industry, we live and die by pennies on the dollar.

      We tend to employee a lot of first and second generation immigrants. Our staff are great people, hard working, and they deserve to be rewarded. We take care of them as best we can, we've long time offered near-guaranteed 40 hour weeks, medical, dental, 401k, things that cannot be assumed in our industry. More than half of our staff have been with us for longer than 10 years.

      But we do not have the profit on the books to be able to raise wages much. it just isn't there. We aren't a tech firm that can command 20% profit margins.

      It's easy to point the finger at service industries and manufacturing and say that we are all crooks that don't treat our staff well. But if we want to stay in business, we have to do so because that is what our industry demands. And to that point, it is what the consumer demands. The only way this will change is if the industry as a whole changes, and that will only happen once consumers are willing to pay higher prices. Until that happens, arguing that industry is all crooks is just ivory-tower window dressing.

      • Your maths doesn't make sense.

        You say 0.2% typical profit, by which I presume you mean net margin? And explain "shareholders earn 0.2 pennies on it".

        Firstly, now way a business can survive that close to the edge, where a tiny operational cost increase wipes you out.

        Secondly, you are suggesting that all net profit goes to shareholder dividend, when in practice with those earnings they'd get nowt.

        • No he said prior to covid it was less than 1% but presumably greater than .2% during covid. Not that different than a grocery store. Typical after tax profit is a little more than 1%. Not everyone is in software where margins can run 50+% or hardware tech with its great margins albeit not as good as software. The food products world is a tough world unless you are selling boutique products or coffee. Although I don't buy starbucks and I got a feeling the margins are pretty slim on the 2.5lbs for 10 bucks I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shmlco ( 594907 )

        Once again, we need to look at see where the money is actually going. Check out the earnings and profits for Mars, PepsiCo, Tyson, Sysco, Cargill, and all of the other major food distributors and suppliers.

        Once more it's the mega corporations who use their market dominance to dictate the prices paid to smaller regional and local businesses.

  • At some point these robots will stop working and you will need to find technicians who can get parts. You trade one problem for another

    • Re:Robots break (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @08:47AM (#63154742) Homepage
      Humans get sick, or retire/die, and traditional industrial vacs (which the humans would need to use to do the same task) also consume power, break, need servicing. Seems more like they've actually removed the human failings from the cost equation, transferred the human wages from OpEx to CapEx, and kept the mechanical OpEx about the same. At $30k each, I guess these vacs only need to last somewhere between 12 and 24 months to breakeven compared to a human if they are saving a whole shift a day, especially since the robots will work weekends and holidays too, so quite likely any failures will also fall within the warranty period.

      • You also save on benefits, if there are such, and other overhead. The cost of an employee is usually around 2-3x their annual salary.

      • Bogus calcuation.

        You can't run robot vaccums 24x7 in a hotel - the clients won't stand for the noise.

        Also, you have to do the rooms when there are no occupants in them. So you don't get the efficiencies of doing every room on the floor one after another.

        Stuff lying on the floor - does the robot pick it up, suck it up, or just vacuum around it?

        • You make some good points. I'm guessing that these are some form of industrial size Roomba, and they're used mostly in the hotel's public spaces. If they're used in the rooms, it's only when the regular housekeeping is going on, and after anything on the floor has been dealt with. And as far as noise goes, they're probably used mostly in the daytime, when guests expect a little noise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Unless the robots are total shit, you don't need one technician for every robot. The ratio of techs to robots should be in the one tech per hundreds of robots range. So if the robot replaces one person, you still come out way, way ahead. And that tech is most likely not going to be employed by the hotel but the robot manufacturer or reseller. So the hotel is just paying either a T&M rate or they are paying a maintenance contract and still coming out well ahead.

    • Even at $30k per robot, you could afford to keep an extra new one in the box. at 5% interest, that is only $150/year to keep a
      spare employee in the closet.
      Chances are, the repairs even at $100/hour would only be a couple times a year so maybe an extra $1000 on top of the $30k.
      No missed shifts, no downtime, no calling in sick, etc...
      It's a complete win for a hotel. It makes no sense for a hotel to hire a human to vacuum empty hallways unless the employee
      is already on the payroll for something else and just

      • I used to stay in hotel rooms a lot. Most of them are kind of designed around daily cleaning which is what makes it complicated. Sure, you can easily make the bed yourself and tidy up, but often times you will need additional towels or something "cleaned" because it is a low-maintenance surface or object that just requires a little special touch every day. Or, things like the towels aren't really designed to be re-used, they are essentially designed to be cleaned every day (low quality but durable materi

  • Maybe the workers have better jobs elsewhere (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chas.williams ( 6256556 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @08:34AM (#63154724)
    There's no mandate that we keep every job in an industry for human workers and it wouldn't make sense to do this. If this did make sense, we would still be employing buggy whip makers. Vacuuming is about as low skilled as you can get, of course, it was going to get replaced by robots. However, vacuuming is only a small part of hotel work. There's another reason hotel workers haven't come back.

    • Re:Maybe the workers have better jobs elsewhere (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cirby ( 2599 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @09:28AM (#63154816)

      That's the problem - it sure seems like they don't have jobs.

      It gets glossed over a lot, but the current unemployment rate is lower than it should be, because at least a million workers stopped working AND stopped looking. They're nowhere to be found in the stats, which should bother you. They're still out there, they're just sitting in their parents' basement, or whatever.

      It's also hard to find ANY industry with more people working in it. Every employer you talk to is complaining about being short of workers. In my business (conventions and meetings), they estimate we're almost 30% short. They've increased pay by a lot (I'm making 50% more than I made three years ago, and I wasn't low paid by any measure then), but they still can't get enough people to do the work, so they're having to pay a lot more due to overtime.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Compared with 15 years ago, a lot more than a million people have stopped looking for jobs. We have a smaller fraction [bls.gov] of people employed plus a smaller fraction [bls.gov] of people looking for work.

      • It gets glossed over a lot, but the current unemployment rate is lower than it should be, because at least a million workers stopped working AND stopped looking. They're nowhere to be found in the stats, which should bother you.

        It bothers me a lot. Every president tells the same lies, so both parties let each other get away with it. Shadow Stats has an alternative unemployment chart that accounts for those people [shadowstats.com], and others. It says what I've been saying here for over a decade, so I may be a bit biased, but their math shows the official unemployment rate growing ever more divorced from reality.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          An important question is why these people are not looking for work though. We are at the tail end of one of the hottest job markets in modern history, there is no reason for anyone to drop out of the job market due to being unable to find a job. Unable to work for whatever reason sure, but unable to find work shouldn't be a thing for most people over the past 2 years.

          • An important question is why these people are not looking for work though.

            Important yes, but we already know the answer, for some value of "we" that includes people who know how to internet. Two-thirds of workers said a low salary is the main reason a job posting did not appeal to them [yahoo.com].

            We are at the tail end of one of the hottest job markets in modern history

            For whom? People who can live on starvation wages?

            there is no reason for anyone to drop out of the job market due to being unable to find a job.

            If only you could hear what you sound like from some position other than one of privilege.

          • Decades ago, I was out of work in Southern California long enough that my Unemployment Benefits ran out. I was rather shocked to learn that I was no longer counted as unemployed, but was considered to have left the workforce. I'm fairly sure that this is just as true now as it was then and is the standard practice across the USA. This is one way how they keep the unemployment numbers artificially low, and it's not going to change until enough senators and congressmen get fed up with it and change the law

  • Workers aren't scarce, wages are.

    Pay a living wage and people will show up to work. Otherwise, they literally can't afford to be there.

    The people complaining that it's hard to find workers are literally all either assholes or idiots. There is no third option.

    If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.

    • Workers aren't scarce, wages are.

      Pay a living wage and people will show up to work. Otherwise, they literally can't afford to be there.

      The people complaining that it's hard to find workers are literally all either assholes or idiots. There is no third option.

      If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.

      What is the living wage?

      I've seen a number of different answers to that question, and some are pretty breathtaking. It really isn't that easy.

      My favorite example is back in 1979 - a co-worker who was making well into 6 figures which was damn good wages at that time always complained to me about not being paid enough. I was just cracking 5 figures at the time and though not wealthy, I was doing okay. All a matter of definition, and fiscal discipline.

      We always run into these issues - what is an entry

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        What is the living wage?

        That's a complicated question, but it's not such a gotcha as you might think. Instead, the answers reveal just how corrupt the whole system is. For example, it'd be a lot lower with rent control, instead of the polar opposite we have now — most housing under the control of businesses all using the same software to create a pricing cartel. It would also be a lot lower with a public health care system.

        I'm all about minimum wage being one that doesn't require a person to get government assistance.

        You can't get the government out of the equation no matter how hard you try. You can only decide where

        • Rent control will just create lotteries, you have to solve artificial scarcity.

          The current situation is an unholy combination of "I've got mine" upper class greens (urban sprawl is evil, if you can't afford a home in an upper class community you should have section 8 next to you), middle class NIMBYs (fuck off with your subsidised high density housing) and government just compromising by allowing almost nothing to be build.

        • Capitalism will build more housing, but you have to get government out of the way. And no, I am not talking fire codes.

          • Capitalism will build more housing, but you have to get government out of the way.

            Most of the places where there aren't empty housing units, there's no water for increased population anyway.

        • What is the living wage?

          That's a complicated question, but it's not such a gotcha as you might think.

          Except it isn't a gotcha. And yes, complicated AF.

          Instead, the answers reveal just how corrupt the whole system is. For example, it'd be a lot lower with rent control, instead of the polar opposite we have now — most housing under the control of businesses all using the same software to create a pricing cartel. It would also be a lot lower with a public health care system.

          No argument on the Public healthcare. I think the NYC experiment with rent control didn't work out too well though.

          The issue -

    • Pay a living wage and people will show up to work. Otherwise, they literally can't afford to be there.

      Living wages aren't scares, generous consumers are. If consumers are willing to pay more for altruism then people can afford a living wage. Otherwise they literally can't afford to stay in business.

      This is why minimum wage laws are a thing. Businesses didn't just race to the bottom for the hell of it, consumers pushed them in that direction demanding ever cheaper shit and then complaining about the quality of service and products.

      If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.

      Congrats, you've just declared multiple whole industries employing millions of

      • Or maybe consumers have been "educated/trained" to look at the cost of everything and the value of nothing?

        I'm quite happy to pay 20%-30% more to get something that I know will both (a) do the job, and (b) last long after the cheap crap is in a landfill somewhere. Because deep down I'm cheap - I don't want to have to buy the same product 3-4 times.

        I'm looking through the Christmas flyers, lots of really cheap big screen TVs with what USED to be name brands, all of those brands having gone bankrupt and

        • Or maybe consumers have been "educated/trained" to look at the cost of everything and the value of nothing?

          No maybe about it. My fundamental point is the race to the bottom is driven by consumer demand.

    • If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.

      Although I don't completely disagree with you, if you were an executive at Mcdonalds or Burger King, what would you do differently?
      If you raised menu prices enough to pay everyone a living wage, everyone would go to one of your competitors across the street instead.
      Yes, these companies do make profit and pay executives well but not near enough extra to pay everyone a living wage without pricing
      themselves out of the market.
      Their solution to stay competitive is to use robots and automation to reduce the numbe

      • Although I don't completely disagree with you, if you were an executive at Mcdonalds or Burger King, what would you do differently?

        Not lobby against minimum wage increases [cnn.com].

      • McDonalds restaurants in other countries pay much higher wages than in the US - true living wages - but the food is not significantly more expensive, allowing for differences in living costs. Why is that? Probably because the bulk of trading profit is not shoveled to a layer of executives at the top.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by teg ( 97890 )

        If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.

        Although I don't completely disagree with you, if you were an executive at Mcdonalds or Burger King, what would you do differently? If you raised menu prices enough to pay everyone a living wage, everyone would go to one of your competitors across the street instead. Yes, these companies do make profit and pay executives well but not near enough extra to pay everyone a living wage without pricing themselves out of the market. Their solution to stay competitive is to use robots and automation to reduce the number of employees needed. Raising wages is not an option.

        Well, if you can't get employees at that salary level, neither can your competitors. So you need to compete on efficiency and paying your staff enough.

        That said, I doubt McDonald's and Burger King are afraid of the competition if they have to raise salary levels to get employees. They're afraid of losing sales - people not stopping and getting that extra meal they shouldn't be having, eating at home, preparing coffee at home etc.

  • OK, putting the staffing issue to the side for a moment, I've always felt a daily clean was OTT when I and occasionally a girlfriend were the only ones occupying the room. I'd always leave the "do not disturb" sign out for 2 or so days unless something happened.

    I've always thought this was an area where hotels were being wasteful, of both money and on environmental grounds.

    Unless you're a total slob and/or don't ever pick up after yourself you shouldn't need the floors done and sheets changed daily. I

    • OK, putting the staffing issue to the side for a moment, I've always felt a daily clean was OTT when I and occasionally a girlfriend were the only ones occupying the room. I'd always leave the "do not disturb" sign out for 2 or so days unless something happened.

      Same here. We've been doing the every three day model, usually after the bath towels were used up.

    • I agree with you, but hotels did it anyway for two reasons:

      (1) You and I may not be the norm, and they didn't want customers complaining if their room wasn't cleaned

      (2) Security theater due to the latest panic of the week, whether it's human trafficking, the Las Vegas shooting, meth labs, or North Korean spies.

  • I'd like to see that (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday December 24, 2022 @09:36AM (#63154828)

    I'm a old fart but I've been in many, many hotel-rooms with women in my life and after the 3rd day, all the visible vacuum-able floor-space is littered with shopping bags, shoe-boxes and other crap.

    You can't even imagine what an hotel-room looks like, where 2 teen girls have been hanging around for a few days.

    Even human vacuums can't handle that.

    • After the 3rd day? Man, you are lucky.

    • Hotel rooms are not typically vacuumed while occupied. There's a reason a typical service in the room takes about 10min, but on checkout day they ask you to leave at 10am but don't let the next person check in until 2pm. A lot more things happen to a hotel room after people take their shit with them.

      If you've ever lived in a hotel you'll see that typically after 1-2 weeks you get a note slipped under the door asking you if the room can be deep cleaned the following day.

  • What They are Not Telling You In this Story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GFS666 ( 6452674 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @10:25AM (#63154880)

    The thing they are not mentioning in this story is that the the main reason that they cannot find people to work for them is that rents for Apartments or just rooms to live in for Long Island are SO high that people can't afford them. It is so bad that Long Island is having problems just getting Teachers and administrators for businesses to go there. Just google high rents and Long Island to see the problem.

    This is a direct outgrowth of the rental businesses wanting high rents at all costs and owners renting out only during "peak" times. I.E. short term profits over long term community stability. But it's not just Long Island. Because of Big Business starting to buy up single family homes and using them as rentals, many communities are going to start seeing this society destruction effect first hand. I'm not a big "government intervention" type of person but the government is going to have to step in here and limit this just for the good of society. It is either that or there is going to be one h*ll of a revolution when big business has most of the homes and the citizens are all renting and can't afford it. And no, I'm not being alarmist here. When South Africa gave land back to their Native Population starting in 1991 they did so for both moral and practical reasons. The main practical reason was that if they didn't, they knew that the next government in power would be a Communist one. I don't remember where I read that but it made a very deep impression on me when I did.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      The thing they are not mentioning in this story is that the the main reason that they cannot find people to work for them is that rents for Apartments or just rooms to live in for Long Island are SO high that people can't afford them. It is so bad that Long Island is having problems just getting Teachers and administrators for businesses to go there. Just google high rents and Long Island to see the problem.

      It's not just there. I live in a suburb of a 2nd-tier city in a fly-over state. Before I bought my current house I rented a townhouse from a local company. It was nice, and reasonably priced. Last time I looked at their prices (just out of curiosity) was in 2019 and it had gone up a little under $100 per month from when I lived there in 2017. I checked again last month and it had almost tripled in price per month, in less than 3 years. That 900 sqft townhome now costs more than my mortgage payments on a 20

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        I checked again last month and it had almost tripled in price per month, in less than 3 years.

        My idiot friend, against my advice, purchased rental property at the top of the market AND got variable rate mortgage. Fear of missing out. When we recently spoke and I asked, mortgage costs up significantly and consequently so is rent. Now, I don't think renters should be on the hook for bad financial decisions for landlords, but this is likely what is driving rent cots up.

    • Re:What They are Not Telling You In this Story (Score:4, Informative)

      by ItsJustAPseudonym ( 1259172 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:43PM (#63155284)
      AirBnB is a big part of the problem in my town. Owners have taken their properties off the market for long-term rental, to reap the profits available for short-term rentals via AirBnB.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        In my town they effectively banned AirBnB (you could only rent your own residence and need a license to do so) and rents are still through the roof.
  • If I rent a hotel room for more than a night, I don't want someone mousing around in there (or even a robot coming in) every day. I can make my own bed. Prior to COVID, I actually had to tell them NOT to bother cleaning/changing sheets/changing towels every day.
  • No, I don't believe they were forced to use a machine they don't have to pay.
  • Their kids don't have to eat. Well, at least the rich get richer, and the Chinese kids, who assembled the robot will have a job, for now.

  • The UK Government is trying to encourage retired people in their fifties to come back to work because there's a shortage of workers here in the UK, exacerbated by the barriers to immigration for workers from abroad imposed by Brexit.

    When COVID-19 hit a lot of people in that age bracket with a decent pension and the house mostly paid off decided to quit their jobs and retire rather than struggle through another decade of work before retiring in their sixties as they had planned to do.

    A lot of these younger "

  • Hotels (in the US) were filthy when humans did the "cleaning". They will continue to be filthy when robots do the "cleaning."

  • The very first thing I do in every hotel is put on the "Do not disturb" door handle and leave it there permanently. I don't want hotel staff to mingle among my personal belongings during my stay.

  • Pro: They can ease on down, ease on down the road.

    Con: They don't carry nothin' that might be a heavy load.

  • Hotels have been cheaping out for years (Score:3)

    by Octorian ( 14086 ) on Saturday December 24, 2022 @02:45PM (#63155404) Homepage

    For years now, hotels have been finding any and every excuse to cheap out on housekeeping services.
    First, it was something about "yadda, yadda, the environment" often with a picture of a snowy owl that's supposedly being saved.
    Then it was something about "yadda, yadda, COVID", which might have been more reasonable, if it was temporary.
    Now they basically don't even try anymore.

    At this point, I'm honestly flabbergasted if I stay in a hotel that actually provides daily housekeeping services. More often it might be once every second or third day, or even only between guests.

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