How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep, Despite Hotel Design

Submitted by Stanis Smith, senior vice president (Vancouver, BC)

"I want a quiet room, far away from the elevators and ice machines, far away from the hotel nightclub, not facing the street or airport, and preferably at the end of the hall."

That's my opening line whenever I check in at a hotel, just after I have given them my hotel points card, which so far has not delivered much more than junk emails for the rest of my life. You would think that hotel designers would consider a quiet sleep to be fairly high up on their list of priorities, but obviously few of them have ever spent a night in one. They and their hotel managers should be sentenced to spend a few nights in the room I once got that was nestled between the elevator and the ice machine—the regular grind, hum and clunk of the elevator machinery occasionally interrupted by a cataract of cascading ice. Or maybe they should try out my room in San Francisco that was thoughtfully located next to a dumpster that was emptied at 3:00 am by banging it against the wall (I kid you not).

So assuming that the cheerful front-desk person, whose smile muscles are permanently frozen, actually knows the hotel layout and listens to your room request, what do you do next to give yourself reasonable assurance that you will get some rest? Well, when you get onto your floor, before entering your room, find the ice machine and unplug it. Sometimes these machines have annoying hard-wired connections into the wall, but where there's a will, there's a way. A pool of water will form in the ice-machine room in the morning, which doesn't really matter except for the occupant of the room on the floor below. If the elevator machine room is on your floor you could try unplugging that as well. Then enter your room and grope around trying to find the light switch. Relax, because this will be nothing compared to your later frustration when you want to switch the lights off. All hotel lighting consultants have gone on a course that prescribes that the reading light for your bed must be controlled from somewhere totally unrelated to your bed. Unscrewing the light bulb works, as long as you don't mind third-degree burns.

But I digress, because we need to deal with noise sources first. Set the thermostat to 0-degrees (C or F), unless you like the intermittent sound of hissing, rattling air vents. So what if ice forms inside the room? Unplug the fridge, because the shudder of a compressor kicking in every hour or so may affect your mental health. This is accomplished by moving the fake-wood unit that houses the fridge and the TV away from the wall. Don't be deterred by the fact that the TV will fall over and a piece of laminate will come off the unit in the process. Then move over to the bed and attack the bedside alarm, which the previous occupant will have programmed to go off at 2:00 am. Pulling it out of the wall socket and putting it in your suitcase is the safest option. Now close the curtains. If they come off their track, wrap them around your head for additional light- and sound-proofing, and anyway, you will need extra bedding because of the room temperature (see thermostat instructions above).

You are now ready, but make sure that you have some clothes next to the bed, because at about 1:00 am some kids will decide to smoke dope in the emergency stairwell, setting off the fire alarm and causing the entire hotel to be evacuated, and people tend to stare when you stand on the sidewalk in your underwear.

Disclaimer: The above account does not portray real events, and even if it did, the writer does not endorse vandalism, theft, willful damage to property, or masochistic practices such as staying in a hotel in the first place.