Unusual room number display at Sofitel So, Bangkok (Photo: Chris McGinnis)
Housekeeper caught you with your pants down? It happens! But who is to blame when embarrassment ensues?
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what a Do Not Disturb sign really means at a hotel. So we hit up a friend of TravelSkills who is a hotel general manager for the skinny. Here’s what he said:
First and foremost, it is one of the cardinal rules of hospitality that employees are not supposed to knock on a door with a DND sign on it. However, there is no legal issue. The hotel has a legal right to ignore the DND sign any time and for any reason. After all it’s their property. The way it’s supposed to work is that a hotel will only violate the DND sign if they have reason to believe that health, safety or property may be an issue. Examples:
- The phone system shows that 911 was dialed from the room.
- The hotel staff heard loud noises coming from the room (potential property damage).
- The hotel staff heard loud voices, arguing or screaming form the room (potential domestic abuse).
- The DND sign has been on the door for 24-48+ hours straight (every hotel has their own standard, but health and well-being of the guest could be an issue here).
- A large number of suspicious people have been seen entering or exiting the room (potential illegal activity).
- Water is leaking into the room from the ceiling (someone left the tub running in the room above? Potential health issue as well as potential property damage).
In practice, there are two main reasons why hotel staff sometimes violate the DND sign:
- The housekeeping staff simply wants to clean their assigned rooms, especially rooms due to check-out that day. They don’t get paid for rooms they are assigned but do not clean, and they’re eager to see if the guest left them a tip.
- Guests will frequently leave the DND sign on their door when they go out for the day. Then when they return they think that somehow, magically, their room was supposed to have been cleaned without someone violating the DND sign. Then they’ll call down to the front desk and complain that their room was not cleaned and flat out lie about having left their DND sign on the door. This happens so often it’s crazy.
So the above two reasons are certainly not valid excuses for hotel staff violating the DND sign, but they go a long way towards explaining why it sometimes happens in hotels without excellent housekeeping management.
What we’ll do at my hotel is that if a staff member encounters a room they need to enter that has a DND sign on it, the staff will ask the front desk to call the room to ask if it’s okay to knock and/or enter. This happens very often with room service. If there’s no answer to the call and there’s no emergency, we will simply not enter, and we’ll hang a sign on the door saying that we respected their request for privacy. And yes, this means that sometimes we’ll leave a room service tray at the door (a fair number of drunk guests order room service, pass out, then wake up to discover their cold meal outside their door in the morning!)
There does seem to be a school of thought out there that thinks the DND sign means that hotel staff should not call the room either, but I don’t subscribe to that. Of course if you request no calls to your room we will abide. In that case, if we still need to communicate with you and there is no emergency, we’ll slip a note under the door.
Likely more than you want to know about hotel DND signs but I had fun writing this all down for the first time 🙂
What are your thoughts on this issue? Is it okay to ignore the Do Not Disturb sign? Do you have any funny stories to share along these lines? Please do so in the comments!
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We are maids that work for the guests we work for the hotel .if there is a dnd sign we do not clean it and if you get back at 3_to 5 pm and want a housekeeping. To clean your room now that your back . we are living that the hotel. And will clean your room any time .after 4. Or even 3pm we are done .we do not like to clean rooms with guests in them . it creepy .and we get more done faster if you are out of the way .-a utah housekeeper
You’re being naive. If they truly are after your stuff, they can still come in. That sign does not magically seal off your room, you know.
Tell your wife to stop calling me then.
You know it’s funny to me that Motel/Hotel staff has too much power over the guest. My wife and I were in a Super 8 Motel in Knoxville Tennessee. I was in bed and she was taking a shower. One of the employees knocked and I went to the window and said just a minute. I was putting my pants on and my wife came out of the bathroom nude after taking the shower when all of a sudden the motel employee barged through the door and let in two maintenance guys to clean the ac unit that was working fine to start with. He could have given me time to get my pants on and open the door as well as letting my wife get dressed. She barely got a text shirt on and had on no bottom at all. The two maintenance guys said they told him to wait and he went ahead and opened the door. The maintenance guys were really agitated at him, as he left them to explain. I got really pissed at him. It was too the maintenance guys fault. Now where was this employee right in his actions?? Tell me this
Just stay home.
I’ll make sure I never forget to use the deadbolt. It really upset me that housekeeping ignored my DND sign. I brought it up to the front desk and they didn’t seem to care. I won’t return to this hotel and will make sure I lock the doors whenever I’m in the room.
And what would you have done if it was a good looking woman clerk?
Its not your problem if housekeeping doesn’t get paid. There’s a checkout time and thats all you have to worry about.
Try using the added security and bolt on your door. But if they saw you in your room, they should have never come in.
I just had this happen in my hotel room. I went for breakfast and felt tired after breakfast. I went back to my room and took a nap after putting up the “do not disturb” sign. I woke realizing someone was in my room. It turned out to be housekeeping. Since I was sleeping on the bed they didn’t change the sheets but cleaned everything else with most of this being done while I was sleeping and had valuables not put away or locked in the safety deposit box. It was 10 am and I took an hour nap and planned to leave the room after my nap leaving it so housekeeping could get a chance to clean my room. Why even have a do not disturb sign?
I leave the DND on the entire stay also. I just don’t want anyone in my room giving them the opportunity to steal something. Just stay out.
I usually leave the DND for my whole stay if it’s under a week. I might just ask for towels to be changed out. My question is, if a maid goes in your room the morning you’re checking out, does that invalidate your key? Because that is my guess. And I find it really irritating because then you have to schlep down to the front desk, wait in line, and have your key reactivated. In answer to the hotel GM who commented, yes, after check out time, all’s fair, but if check out is at noon, and I have the DND on my door, I expect that to be respected until noon. The fact that many guests misuse the DND is no excuse for hotel staff to disregard it. I do feel however in this techie era that there should be a way for guests to provide an approximate check out time to the hotel. I mean if you have a 6 a.m. flight and your check out is at 4 a.m. and the DND is still up at 8 it’s totally legit for the maids to knock and go in. While in the room I always close the privacy thingie so nobody can come in.
I was in a Starwood Hotel that participates in the Make a Green Choice program (decline housekeeping) I had both the Do Not Disturb and the MAGC hangers on the door. They made up my room anyway. When I mentioned this to the (apologetic) manager, he investigated and the housekeeper said she didn’t see the DND behind the MAGC.
Let’s keep this REAL. The DND sign should mean just what it says: DO NOT DISTURB! Without a doubt, when housekeeping goes into your room when there is a DND sign on it, they are not only violating your privacy but they are “casing” your room and looking for things to steal. This happens to me all the time and I always complain to the front desk. If a housekeeper comes into my room and the DND sign is on, you are up to no good. Period.
It did not mean a bloody thing at the Sofitel on W44th in NYC. Key in and straight into the room. Oh Sorry Sir.
The simple way I think of the DND – is as a preference or a guide. It is not a command. There are two things which irk me in house keeping practices: 1) the house keeper who goes door to door at 8am or earlier, knocking on every door loudly with a key. Even if they skip the DND room – it wakes up everyone, which is exactly what they wanted. I always call the management to complain. 2) is the use of the drain stop in the bathtub shower to indicate if you’ve used the shower. For some of us, that is an awkward thing to open.
We put it on the door to avoid having housekeeping come in every day. If it’s just a two night stay, we keep it there the whole time. While it’s nice to come back to a freshened room, I think it’s wasteful of resources. I don’t change my sheets or towels every day at home. Also, I always separate recycling, and I find I have to hide the bag from the housekeeping staff or they throw it out!
Do to jet lag, I often don’t schedule morning meetings and sleep in. It seems like a fair amount of times I’ve had housekeeping knock on the door–as early as 8:30 am–even though it is marked. I guess that is reason #1?
If I hang a sign that says “do not disturb”, and the hotel worker knocks on my door, I am no doubt disturbed. I always complain and receive bonus points.
We always put the DND sign out in the evening then take it down in the morning after we have dressed, gone to breakfast and are ready to go out for the day or at least several hours. That way housekeeping doesn’t have to clean around us.
I always put it on if I go out at night – I assume it reduces the chance of theft if passers by think the room is occupied.
I was at a hotel in Lithuania, taking a shower (glass door, not frosted — you could see right through it) when a Front Desk Clerk burst into my room, came into the bathroom, waiving a fax that they just received, addressed to me, that was marked “URGENT.”
I tried covering myself while trying to get him to put the fax down and that I would read it in a minute. He kept waiving it and saying “URGENT! IT SAYS URGENT! URGENT!!”
The only way to get rid of him was to thank him profusely for his attentiveness, pretend to quickly read the document (which really wasn’t urgent) and thank him again for bringing me this urgent message.
Fascinating post, thanks.
I have always liked the W hotels and their W-centric decor and signs. If I recall correctly, their “Do Not Disturb” sign is “When? Not now.” Very clever.
I generally keep the “Do Not Disturb” sign up whenever I’m in the room. Too many times a housekeeping staff member (we called them “maids” when I was a kid) will rap a knuckle on the door, blurt out “Housekeeping,” and then burst into the room like a SWAT team. I’ve never been caught in an inconvenient state of dress (or worse), but it could easily have happened.