Lydia Gordon of the New York Post is on the money with her critique of hotels’ failure to soundproof their rooms. My #1 complaint in hotels, of all categories, is noise. What good is a fantastic bed with a gazillion pillows if you can’t sleep because of a loud TV, an arguing or passionate couple, or a bevy of brats running up and down the halls screaming late at night?
Gordon names names — the Standard Miami and Chicago’s Peninsula and James hotels feature posh interiors but thin walls. If hotels were serious about soundproofing the walls between rooms, it would cost $1470 per room. A higher cost, to be sure, but rapidly recouped at higher end chains.
My wife and I were serenaded with slamming doors and hallway noise just this past Saturday night. And this reinforced my theory of hotel noise, and my one key addendum to the NY Post article: The Achilles heel of any hotel room remains the door.
The door is the crux on two counts: First, 99% of hotel doors slam shut with a metallic crash. Is there a way to dampen this blow, say, with a rubberized lining of the door frame? Even if the people next door don’t talk or use the TV, you hear their door when they enter and leave.
Second, the gap under the door itself allows an inordinate amount of hallway sound into the room, including the sound of other rooms’ slamming doors. (And often a bit of light, too.) I’ve blocked the door with a towel before, but this shouldn’t really be necessary. It’s as if the doors were built to glide over a 4-inch shag carpet. Every housekeeping cart, every parent scolding a child, and every other room door slamming shut — all these sounds enter your room through the poorly-constructed door.
Some hotels are coming up with half-baked solutions. Crowne Plaza offers “Quiet Zones,” which promise a quieter sleeping experience, but the program is still woefully misguided:
That’s not good enough. Inevitably, someone will suggest traveling with earplugs, and that’s fine, but I don’t think I’m off base in thinking that earplugs shouldn’t be mandatory for a night of sleep at an upscale hotel.
We’ve witnessed the hotel industry’s Bed Wars. Hopefully soundproofing is next. Bring on the Door Wars.
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July 27th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Amen. 100% agree. What good is a nice room if it has a crappy door?
February 25th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
[...] Nonetheless, I’m still hoping for a lodging chain to take up my saber-rattling calls for Door Wars. [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The door slamming is the #1 thing I hate about sleeping in all hotels. The worst is when the actual hotel staff (housekeeping) doesn’t even understand this… allowing doors to slam as they go in and out cleaning a room.
April 7th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
[...] Tough day in the mosh pit? Leave the mud people behind and retire to your tent room. Travelodge’s UK division is renting “Travelpods” — tents equipped with real beds, running water, and somewhat greater comfort — at European music festivals. And no slamming doors. [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:07 am
[...] Regular readers know what’s coming. My longstanding pet peeve: Loudly clicking and slamming hotel doors that let in 80% of the sound from the hallway. The bed wars may be over, but the door wars have yet [...]
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I wholeheartedly agree. Let’s not put the entire onus on the hotel operators. There’s an element of operator error, as well. I always take the extra 3-5 seconds that it takes to shut the door quietly. I can shut a door silently when entering the room by turning the handle to retract the latch and then letting it out after resisting the door closer and shutting the door softly.
It’s not always so easy when leaving, because of the fact that the outer handle doesn’t do anything without running the key card through it. But at least I get most of the way closed and then pull it shut with sufficient force to close and lock it, but no more than that.
Ultimately, I see that our society (USA) is losing its sense of civility and respect for the needs of others. I can’t change society as a whole, but I can change my own actions, and I try to encourage my peers to be more considerate, too. They usually just laugh at me, and I guess they think I am a throwback, even though I’m only 35 years old.
June 3rd, 2007 at 2:00 am
I am so glad to see that I am not the only person annoyed at so much noise in hotel rooms.
David, I agree with you, I do the same thing in trying to be as quite as I can, when entering or leaving my room.
The number of people in this country, that care less about others, is growing at an alarming rate; then we wonder about so much stress and violence going on.
It would be great to see the majority of Hotels, putting more money towards soundproofing their rooms. The materials are now available. I think most of us would pay a bit more, if we knew that we would not have to worry about noise, when we rare trying to relax/sleep in our Hotel rooms.
October 7th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[...] build new facilities. Better walls, yay! But no mention of better doors. Nice try, people! The Door Wars are still [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
My concern is not noise pollution. Soft foam earplugs usually take care of that.
My concern is “light pollution”, an increasing problem in hotel rooms. Now that tech companies are putting LED lights into every device they can think of from the smoke detector to the coffee maker, trying to sleep in a modern hotel room is like trying to sleep at a “Laser Floyd” show. Take my last trip to Reno for example:
Wonderful upgrade to a suite for no apparent reason..nice..but the thermostat in the room had a 3×5 inch display with a blue backlight and it could not be turned off..this put out enough light at night to walk around by. It looked like moonlight. And it could not be turned off. Oh, my horse for a post-it to cover it up.
The 42 inch, wall mounted flat panel TV was also a bonus..except that it’s red power off LED shone like a ball of fire in the room. It actually cast shadows! If it’s OFF, why does it need a light to tell you it’s off? And if it has a light, is it REALLY off?
Then the smoke detector. I know, it keeps me safe. The green LED in it indicates it’s working. This is required by law. So there it is above the bed, casting a bright green beam into my eye like a teen with a laser near the airport.
And as a frequent traveller I have to mention that finding a room where the curtains completely close is a rare treat. Most of the time there is that little gap in the middle where the white lights of the parkinglot creep in at night and sun makes it’s first appearance in the daytime. And who can forget the light that leaks around the sides?
It’s a good thing hotels usually provide more pillows than you need to sleep with, because those extra pillows will have to go onto the floor near the door to block out the copious amounts of light creeping in underneath.
Personally, I like to sleep in pitch darkness. I know most people don’t mind a bit of light, but sometimes these rooms are so bad that you might as well sleep with all the lights on, for it will not make a differance.
August 29th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Are there ANY hotel that have doors that shut quietly? I don’t really care about anything else. I only want it quiet.
October 17th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Forget about price, friendliness of staff, junk buffet breakfast’s, etc. if you can’t sleep due to noise the whole deal stinks. Those of us who travel quite a bit know peace and quiet is the top priority. The management doesn’t get it. Hotels are about booking and not so much about loyal customers. They don’t hesitate to book the soccer/baseball team with wild kids and parents next to adults without kids who simply want a night’s sleep. Staying at a hotel on Friday and Saturday evening is a nightmare and the staff doesn’t want to address noise. You get the point, most hotel charge a fancy rate for a room in which you get to experience doors slamming all night and people raising hell without providing any policing of the problem.