You may not like whom you’re sharing your hotel with.
A new study titled “Hotel Hygiene Exposed” finds that the average hotel room is teaming with more icky bacteria than a typical home, airplane, or school. It’s almost enough to tempt a traveling germophobe to sleep on the airport bench instead.
“We’re definitely not trying to scare anyone,” Emily Pierce, project manager for Travelmath, which conducted the study, tells Yahoo Travel. “We wanted to know just how many bacteria we could find on common surfaces in the hotel rooms.”
Teams armed with cotton swabs, plastic bags, and strong stomachs tested rooms in nine different hotels. Three-star, four-star, and five-star hotels in a variety of locations were included in the study.
The result? Not only did Travelmath find that hotel rooms had ample populations of those microscopic creepy-crawlies, they discovered that four-star and five-star hotel rooms tend to be dirtier than less luxurious three-star hotels.
“That was definitely kind of a surprise for us, because the five-star hotels are known for those extra amenities, the extra service, the extra luxury,” says Cristina Lachowyn, outreach manager on behalf of Travelmath. “So one would assume that the extra money you’re spending for those extra stars would also go into housekeeping!”
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In the Travelmath study, each team swabbed the same four surfaces in each hotel room they visited: the bathroom counter, the remote control, the desk, and the phone. According to the study description, Travelmath “tested for the presence of various types of bacteria (including bacilli and cocci), yeast, and gram-positive rods (bacteria that cause various ailments, such as skin infections and pneumonia) and gram-negative rods (bacteria that cause respiratory and other infections).”
The results prove that luxury doesn’t necessarily buy cleanliness. Here’s a breakdown:
1. Bathroom counters
A study cited by WebMD found the average household bathroom had 452 bacteria per square inch. But Travelmath finds hotel bathrooms are far dirtier: Three-star hotels have an average of 320,007 colony-forming units (CFU) per square inch; four-star hotels an average of 2,534,773 CFU per square inch; five-star hotels an average of 1,011,670 CFU per square inch. The overall hotel average is 1,288,817 CFU per square inch.
Travelmath found the bathroom counters in three-star hotels were the cleanest of the bunch (with clean, of course, being a relative term where bathrooms are concerned). Lachowyn speculates that the ornate, intricate bathrooms you find in four-star and five-star hotels&mdashwith their designer sinks that look like artistic sculptures—might be harder to clean than the basic
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