Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Niu Honglin, joined by Steve and Yusheng.
A hotel stay is supposed to bring rest, not worry.
Yet for many travelers today, the simple act of using a towel, or even the beddings, has become a small leap of faith.
What should be the expectations of ordinary people who just want to feel safe away from home?
And you know we love hearing from you, and Heart to Heart is where we get to respond.
You've sent in your thoughts and questions, and now it's time for us to weigh in.
In today's Heart to Heart segment, we again will hear a very interesting question and we will provide our insights.
But first, we love spontaneous weekend trips and low-cost getaways, but...
The reality behind some hotel rooms can be much less romantic.
Social media is filled with people exposing reused slippers, unwashed cups, mystery branded toiletries and cleaning done in minutes rather than with care.
What's really happening behind the scenes?
How clean is clean enough?
And what do we really know about the hotel products we used to use without thinking?
To answer all these questions, let's first take a look at the reality these days.
What are we doing in these hotels and why are we doing this?
First of all, I have to admit that I belong with this group that I'm about to describe to you guys.
So, first of all, more and more people we're trying to bring disposable utensil or disposable stuff while we're going on the trip, especially when we're trying to stay in a hotel.
That include disposable bed sheets, toilet seat covers slippers, compressed towels or just maybe simply a towel from home.
That will count too.
But sometimes even more technology related stuff like UV sanitizer, to just keep to keep yourself, stay as clean as you feel like when you're staying in a hotel room that's perhaps used by hundreds of people before you.
So one traveler joked online saying that half of my suitcase is clothes, when the other half is protective gears.
Some even call them the hotel survival kit, because people feel, including myself, that certain amounts or layers of protection is more
Well, it makes you feel more comfortable when you stay in a questionable hotel hygiene environment.
I have questions for you in just a moment.
But this isn't new.
This behavior is not new, but it has become a little bit more intense.
In the last year or so, more and more people are bringing their own things to a hotel.
On Red Note, There were over 150,000 posts that had the tag of disposable things for hotels.
And those got about a billion views in total traffic.
Meituan.
Flash delivery saw 140% growth in disposable travel goods.
JD showed some disposable bedsheets sets at 40,000-plus monthly sales.
Taobao searches for disposable bedsheets surged by nearly 200 right before the national holiday, which is when a lot of people will go and stay in a hotel.
Told you, I'm not alone.
E-commerce sites.
It's evident that this is a real thing and that people are obviously very concerned about the sanitary upkeep of their hotels.
Okay, so you go to the hotel, you use your own stuff, you even bring a UV light to clean everything.
Probably you will bring some alcohol towel to clean the surface and everything.
Two packs, to be exact.
Two packs of alcoholics hats in my suitcase every time when we took our business trips this year and then you pay the hotel, should then the hotel be paying you for cleaning the room?
Gosh, I feel like yeah, you're right.
Yeah, that's my question.
Is it too well, okay?
So my question is um Do you always do this, or when did you start doing this?
That's a very good question, because when I look at my action pattern, that all comes from how my mom does it while we took trips when I was a kid.
Because my mom working as a nurse.
She cares perhaps overly on the hygiene for everything inside the hotel room and she would just clean all the surface with alcoholic pads.
Even before alcoholic pads is a thing between among Chinese families and she always tell me that in public for seating toilets you never seat on top of it unless you place, you clean it ahead or you place like paper towels on top of it.
I'm not sure if it's a thing for you guys too, but Not at all.
I grow up knowing that those seats cannot be set.
That's different.
That's a public toilet.
Yeah, public toilet.
Sometimes there will be a little dispenser inside the stall and you can press it and it goes And the little paper comes out and you can put it down.
Back to the hotel room.
So every time you go to a hotel, you take disposable bed sheets with you.
Yep.
Wow.
Well, not always disposable.
Now i have a washable bedsheet that i bring just from home just for trips that i don't use at home, but it's just for business trips.
Wow, i feel bad sending yushan to business trips.
You're doing too much.
Okay.
So the reason I'm asking you this is that for some people, they didn't start this from the very beginning.
They started doing it because they read the news reports, they watched the videos on social media and the incidents I would call them incidents in the hotels of people using the same towel to clean both the toilet and the cup, and some customers using maybe a water boiler to clean their own clothes to boil their own clothes.
These incidents, accidents happened 1% or less than 1%, 0.01% of the time.
But those incidents are scary.
They're enough to make people concerned.
That's what I was talking about.
Yeah, we were chatting about this story in the office the other day.
And we were talking about the teapot in a hotel room and yushan said i'll never use the teapot.
I said why not?
And you said people might boil their socks in there.
And i thought right, it never occurred to you, occurred to me.
And then i started thinking how much sock tea have i had in my life?
Okay, Okay.
Not necessarily every time it happens.
Yeah, let's not give the impression, by the way, that this is like a cultural thing and everybody's boiling their underwear in the teapot at the hotel.
That's not true.
It's just it might pop up on social media once or twice, like you said, and then people are wary of it and then nobody wants to use that thing anymore.
Yes.
And my next question actually is how clean is clean enough?
And I'm asking this from the point of a parent.
As a mom when my kid was under the age of two, I clean everything that he touches almost everything.
And I would not allow him to climb or crawl on the outside world floor.
He could do that in my own home.
But when it's a playground or grass, I don't want him to do that.
But gradually, I realized to start with, he has the ability to well his immune system, to be more precise, to defend the germ outside.
And I should even give him the chance to do that, so that the immune system would be able going through enough fights so it knows what it's doing against the outside world.
And I was thinking for those who are not like Yushan, who's been doing it her entire life, for those who are only bringing started to bring their own towels, their own bedsheets.
Started to even bring a UV light to clean the room.
Is there anything that actually happened to you during your previous trips that give you the scar that leads to the fact that you have to feel like you're protecting yourself all the time?
Or is it just the kind of stories, the not typical but scary enough stories that are scaring you?
Are you being clean, being too clean?
From Yahoo Life 2023.
According to studies based on hotel inspections, oftentimes hotel bedding isn't changed at all after a guest checks out.
In shocking research from Amerisleep, when it comes to hotel bedding and linens, five star hotels had over three times as many violations as their four star counterparts.
In fact, five star hotels had more violations than one star hotels, with several having bedding or linen violations across the board.
Oops.
It sounds disgusting.
It sounds intimidating and scary.
And yes, in certain situations it might lead to skin problems, and Yeah, but I understand that I didn't answer your question.
That was the lawyer in me.
But my standard for having an enjoyable experience at a hotel is not after my stay saying...
Wow, I didn't get any skin rashes.
That shouldn't be the bar.
That shouldn't be the expectation.
But instead of encouraging or looking at the fact, not saying anything about people bringing their own stuff, should we be making the regulation stricter, making sure the hotels are cleaning their bed sheet and they're not using the same towel to clean the floor and the table and my cup?
Yeah.
Okay, so let's talk about the environmental side of this, because several regions, most recently Guangxi, they've proposed rules requiring hotels not to proactively provide single-use items like toothbrushes or combs or razors or bath sponges, unless guests ask for them.
That comes after national guidelines were issued in 2019 which require star-rated hotels across the country to stop offering most single-use plastic amenities by 2022.
Right.
Now, If we think the hotels are taking these steps to protect the environment, and then we're buying and bringing single-use plastics or whatever to the hotels,
Defeats the purpose.
It totally defeats the purpose, right?
So the hotels are doing something to try to protect the environment, but then we're bringing things into the hotel to make it worse for the environment.
And it's kind of an interesting odd situation.
Only when things start to concern people, I think that's when this whole concern rises in the first place, because if let's imagine, the hotels are providing a safe enough environment for everybody and that news we just touched upon never happened and need not that one-third a part of my suitcase should be occupied of all those disposable stuff in the first place.
That was going to be another question of mine, like how much of your suitcase is dedicated to disposable linens or towels or what have you?
And how long does it take for you to clean the room before you can sit on one of the couches?
Oh, how do you know?
There's a certain part of my couch that I only sit with clothes that I wear outside of my home.
But anyways, it's too late for people like me perhaps, who grew up with this habit, because changing habits might make us feel uncomfortable, like genuinely uncomfortable.
But I do get your point, Hong Ling, when you mentioned how you changed your mind with the children upbringing.
And that's shared by many parents that I've seen on social media as well.
How are we asking our next generation to realize the hygienic standard is perhaps more than how we're doing it right now.
Like the, what did you call it?
The self-protection function in your body, that's formed ever since at a very young age.
So even though under two-year-old, the kid might be putting a lot of things in his mouth and he could be touching everywhere, that's a growing process for his own body as well.
So perhaps in the future, it's, It should be less of a concern.
I mean, I honestly don't think it's that much of a concern now, or at least it shouldn't be.
It's just that hygiene scandals tend to stick in public memory for a long time.
And there have been isolated cases in different cities in China.
And this would be true in America and England and Australia and Canada for sure.
But the China Hospitality Association inspection report from 2023 showed a 98 linen replacement rate in five-star hotels, 93 in four-star hotels.
But still, public sentiment says this.
This is one quote from a traveler.
I don't believe this.
I believe the statistics.
I just don't trust my room.
I just don't trust the chance.
Okay, so here's the thing.
We know sometimes some of the equipment or some of the items you bring to the hotel can be harmful for the environment.
And you don't necessarily want to do that.
You just are too scared so that you're doing it.
That's for the customers.
And for hotels, they do not like their reputation to be contaminated.
They do not like people to think that their teapots are, again, contaminated.
And what... can the hotels do to restore the trust, to make the travel experience more enjoyable?
Well, it's totally one pressure point for the hotels, but also good opportunity for them to evolve and grow in this whole process.
Because when?
Well, some major chain hotel chains have already trying to move hygiene from behind the scenes to something guests can actually see for their own eyes.
So some plan, some will just aim for half of its hotel to use certified laundry suppliers within a year.
And also China Travel Hotel Group has also introduced the transparent four-level lean-in management system so that even before we get in the hotel, when we're booking the hotel, we can already see how it's been managed before we arrive.
Yeah, and to take it a step further, there's a hotel in Fuzhou that installed smart chips that let guests check the exact replacement time of sheets and towels, and even cups.
Nice.
So it allows the customer to know exactly when things were changed.
That's a good idea, too.
You're listening to Roundtable.
Coming up next, Roundtable's Heart to Heart.
Don't go away.
You ask.
We answer.
Roundtable.
Heart to Heart.
Hold on.
I've got to get my popcorn for this one. this is a good one it is a good one and it is roundtable with myself new helen steve hatherly and yushan we are going to the heart to heart segment and we have a voice memo from bruce dear teachers of the roundtable china team greetings i'm bruce your old friend recently i've run into a quite disturbing issue and i would like to share it with you hoping to get some valuable advice my wife and i are ordinary office workers with a stable but not wealthy income.
However, some time ago she secretly lent 20000 yuan to her aunt who runs a business, without telling me at all.
I'm not opposed to helping relatives, but this act of concealing and not consulting me makes me feel both deceived and disrespected.
At that time, her aunt promised to repay the money within a month.
But half a year has passed.
The money is still unpaid.
Interestingly, their family has two luxury cars, a Mercedes and a Beamer.
And she always looks good when going out.
But from what I know, she and her husband are total paycheck to paycheck.
They seldom save a penny and even have to borrow money from others when emergencies pop up.
Do you have anyone around you who lives such a robbing Peter to pay Paul, life owning nice houses and fancy cars but constantly short on cash?
I wonder if any of you or viewers have this kind of relatives or encountered similar troubles.
When facing such a situation, where kindness overlooks the partner's feelings, how should we balance family ties, trust and family boundaries?
I sincerely look forward to your answers.
Wish Roundtable China continued success and keep bringing warm and valuable content to the audience.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bruce.
And thank you so much for sending in the voice memo at the same time.
Thank you for your trust, sharing with us your real concern in your life.
So what do you think?
Have you ever encountered people like that, who live paycheck by paycheck, yet with a luxurious lifestyle?
And what do you think about, you know, family management of your shared money?
I certainly have a large family who share similar issues with certain distant family members that I'm not going to name in particular.
But here's what I feel, Bruce.
I might be underqualified to tell anything to you, since I'm not married and I haven't been in a long enough relationship to you know voice any opinions on this concern.
But you did share that.
Your biggest concern let's say disappointment here is on the fact that your wife didn't really got your consent before the money is used elsewhere.
It's a very nice gesture of her to try to sorry, to be fair, he didn't say consent uh, rather um, he just said she didn't tell me.
Yeah yeah, so it's an important point.
Yes it's, it's a nice gesture that your wife is trying to help out, like you mentioned.
But if it's the money of your individual small family that is being mentioned and used here, then yeah, I would advise that a very thorough chat or talk make it a talk a deep conversation with your wife about your disappointment and your true thoughts is kind of necessary.
Yep, that's all from my side.
Yeah, I guess Steve, judging by your posture right now, he has a lot to share.
Oh, Bruce.
So you're upset, Bruce, and I think you have a right to be upset.
But here is the kind of Buddha level, in my opinion, response to this.
Obviously, you want to say like, how could you do that to me?
How could you?
That's our money.
You loaned it without even consulting me first and making a plan for this.
And that's why you feel deceived.
And that's why you feel disrespected.
But here's what I try to do in any type of conflict.
Rather than look the action that happened, try to look at the reason for the action that happened.
So what happened was she loaned money.
Okay, whatever.
It's $20,000.
It's a lot of money, but yet it's not like make it or break it life-ending money, right?
So the real question here, I think, is why didn't she share that information with you?
And I think it's because she knew you wouldn't agree.
Maybe or maybe not.
But I think as a response Bruce, rather than going to her and saying you know you disrespected me.
You deceived me.
You're saying you, you, you, you.
You're explaining it from your side.
But the reason I said Buddha level is because why don't you try to think about it from her side and think hmm,
Why didn't she feel comfortable coming to me with this first?
And approach her with that kind of attitude, rather than talking about the disrespect and the deception.
You're just being defensive at that point.
What you really want to do is try to get to the heart of the issue or the root of the problem here, so that it perhaps doesn't happen again.
And for different families, they have different ways to manage their own money.
For example, in my family, I don't know exactly every month how much my husband earns.
And I don't know if he knows my situation.
We're just a little too...
Not careless, but a little bit.
But we definitely have conversations with major decisions when it has something to do with the family money.
And also we trust each other in the sense that even our accounts are separately, our decision making is jointly.
And maybe you can talk to your wife, because we had a phase of not really on the same page when it comes to spending, let's say beliefs.
We have different consumption ways.
And I buy too expensive food when he sometimes only spends that kind of money on gadgets.
So it's a little bit different.
Yushan spends all her money on disposable bed sheets.
Yeah, that's true.
So Be on the same page with your spouse.
No matter, you don't have to have the exact same understanding about money, but at least you need to be able to talk to each other and know each other's situation.
That's more important.
And that brings us to the end of today's roundtable.
Thank you so much for listening.
It's me, Niu Honglin, with Yushan and Steve.
We'll see you next time.
