How I’m cleaning hotel rooms while on the road

We may receive a commission when you use our links. Monkey Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Monkey Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities. We appreciate you using our links!!!

---

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been visiting family, considering a potential move, and as a result have stayed in a variety of hotels. While hotels are certainly purporting a deep cleaning ritual, I just don’t trust it. So, leaving to hit the road, we made sure we packed a cleaning kit to ease our minds.

We’ve stayed at a wide range of hotels since we left. A quick round-up: A Ritz, two Grand Hyatts, two Hyatt Houses, a Homewood Suite, and a two Hyatt Places. My fiancee and I have adopted a routine and have become fairly adept at honing it now that we’ve done it quite a few times. Of all the places we’ve stayed, a Hyatt Place in Athens, Georgia impressed me the most. At check-in there were wipes, hand sanitizer, and not only did the manager wear a mask, but was changing into fresh gloves for each guest. Not bad for a place that charged us just $88 for the night.

Below is a quick video that describes the extent to which we’ve been cleaning.

Our Kit includes:

• 3 – 75 wipe – Clorox wipe bottles
• 2 Clorox spray bottles
• 6 rolls of Paper Towels
• 6 rolls of toilet paper
• 2 large Hand sanitizer gel bottles
• 2 large Hand Sanitizer spray bottles
• 2 small gel bottles
• 2 small spray bottles
• 4 packs of sanitizing wipes for food containers

We found the above kit pretty arduous to carry around, and we quickly devised a strategy after our first two nights on the road ( those two nights we carried the entire kit inside ).

We decided to pack a quick clean and overnight bag that included a bottle of clorox wipes, a spray bottle, toilet paper and paper towels + a change of clothes + dopp kit. We’d repack once we arrive at a destination where we’d spend more than a night and unload more of the car.

What we clean:

• First thing we clean is a surface to set all of our cleaning products down on
• Then we proceed to clean every single thing anyone could have touched that we would touch
  • The things we first missed
    • The headboard of the bed
    • Inside of a mini-fridge
    • The curtain cords
    • The handrail and temperature control inside the shower
    • The doorlock

I would highly recommend wearing gloves otherwise you’ll get some serious skin irritation.

While this sounds time consuming, we’ve gotten it down to under 10 minutes on a standard room, and a little over on a Hyatt House/Place where a kitchen is included. We even bleach the floor. The only thing we don’t clean are the sheets and couches ( which we now cover with blankets that we wash if we use the couch ). Once everything is cleaned, we go back down to the car, grab anything else we’d need and leave it in the entryway of the room and unpack individual items there.

Part of me thinks what we’re doing is all overkill, but there’s no way I’d sleep well at night if we didn’t clean. We’re also leaving significantly higher housekeeping tips to try and help out.  We have consistently heard stories of part time workers, recent re-openings, and the hardships many places have faced.

Recap

I’m certainly not advocating hitting the road and traveling, but we’re doing the best we possibly can given the circumstances, and I’ve been very impressed with the the lower end hotels. Let me know if you’ve traveled recently and what your routine is to sanitize.