The one thing that every hotel should have, but doesn’t

Posted By Jon Nickel-D'Andrea on Apr 6, 2017 | 3 comments

Being as we travel as much as we do, staying in hotels is a necessity. When you sleep so many nights away from home, you want your experience to be as little of a departure from the norm as possible. When simple things are missing from hotels, it can become a burden and wreck your stay. With that said, when you’re traveling in a new country or city, it can be hard to get accustomed to your surroundings.

Many hotels all over the world will do things to make it as little of a change as possible by offering different pillow types (down, foam, feather free, etc) or even amenities that make you feel welcome. Many times we arrive to find handwritten notes and small things like extra bottled water, a food amenity, etc, just to make us feel even more welcomed.

But there’s one thing, one super simple thing, which I think all hotels should be doing to make the experience better for their guests. And you know what the best part is? It won’t even cost anything extra for the hotels to implement, apart from perhaps two to three cents in printing costs.

After a long day of touring about in a foreign country, sometimes it’s nice to come back to your hotel room and click on the TV to see what’s going on in the world around you. In many countries, finding an English-speaking channel is a challenge. In one of our stays in Italy a couple of years back, we got sucked into watching this quasi-porno mattress salesperson, even though we couldn’t pick up a word of what she was saying.

Flip on the TV

The problem is that every hotel has a different set of satellite channels, and some don’t have any English channels apart from perhaps CNN or BBC world. How hard would it be for ALL hotels to make a push to get a channel list in the room for guests to know which channel to go to?

Now sure, I expect many of you will come back and say “oh come on, there’s usually a guide button on the remote control.†Yes, sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn’t and I spent 30 minutes flipping through channels trying to find something in English!

Hotel TV Channel Guide

Some televisions that we’ve used even have upwards of 100 radio channels towards the end of the dial. I’d love to be able to avoid that and just go directly to what we want to watch.

The Four Points hotels that we’ve stayed at usually, as a rule, have channel guides. Many of the apartment-style hotels (like Residence Inn or Element Hotels) also have channel guides since truly you are supposed to feel like a home away from home. I’m tired of having such simple things missing from hotels.

So, hotels of the world, PLEASE! I implore you to please take time out of someone’s day to make a simple list for us, your guest. Put the paper just underneath the remote on the nightstand and make our stay just that much better.

Is there something that you would like to see all hotels do that would make your stay better? Let us know below!