Housekeepers cry ‘foul’ as U.S. hotels do away with daily room cleaning

Hotel housekeepers want customers to know that rejecting daily room cleaning is making their work harder and threatening their jobs and benefits. SCREENGRAB/CNN

Hotel housekeepers are reeling from heavier workloads as hotels across the United States have slashed the number of housekeepers or cut the number of hours of those still employed while asking them to take on more chores.

The housekeeping cuts followed hotels’ elimination of daily room cleaning service during the pandemic. Hotel industry leaders say customers actually prefer it because the see daily housecleaning as wasteful, according to an Associated Press report.

Workers and union organizers, however, say profit-making is behind the cuts in the number of housekeepers. Also, housekeepers who are switched to an on-call basis only risk losing health care and other benefits if they can’t earn the required work hours.

“It’s a big change for us,” Luz Espejo, a 60-year-old originally from the Philippines who has cleaned rooms at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki for 18 years, told AP. “We are so busy at work now. We cannot finish cleaning our rooms.”

At the height of the pandemic, many hotels switched to offering room cleaning only if a guest asked for it, or only after a certain number of days. Guests were asked to reuse towels or specifically request for clean ones.

But even as safety restrictions have eased  and travel has picked up many hotels are keeping their new cleaning policies in place.

Housekeepers say they want customers to ask for daily cleaning because it makes their work easier. Rooms left uncleaned for days are much harder to restore to a pristine state, especially the bathrooms.

They also want customers to know that rejecting daily room cleaning is making their work harder and threatening their jobs and benefits.