Housekeeping and Casinos

In class today, Reneta showed us a new special about the cleanliness on hotel rooms. Albeit, the clip wasn't recent, but the reporter discovered that hotel rooms - from economy brands to luxury brands - are pretty much disgusting. After searching the room under a backlight, the reporter found several stains from urine and semen all over "clean" sheets, walls, and even in baby cribs that some hotels provide. In addition to the backlight test, the reporter took samples of the bacteria living on areas where hands are most likely to touch and concluded that in general, hotels aren't using disinfectants to clean their rooms and that he reason why bacteria, that should remain in the bathroom, can be found in the other parts of the room because the same towel used to wipe down the bathroom is being used to wipe down other areas in a hotel room.

Personally, I believe that this is the case because companies are trying to reduce expenses. On average, a housekeeper will have to clean 16 rooms in one day which means that a room should be cleaned in about 30 minutes. During that half an hour, the housekeeper has to change sheets, make the bed, change the towels, amenities, wipe down the bathroom, as well as numerous other tasks.

If hotels hired more housekeepers so that current housekeepers could clean fewer rooms and dedicate more time to properly cleaning rooms, I believe that rooms would be a much cleaner place to be.

I'm the afternoon, Reneta led a lecture on casinos. I found I interesting that psychology plays such a huge role in the design and layout of the casinos. For example, the casino floor isn't designed so that anyone can see all the exits because the casino doesn't want people to feel that they've seen everything there is to see. On the flip-side, casinos don't try to trap customers on he floor because if a person feels trapped then he/she is more likely to leave early to escape feeling trapped. In order to maximize the amount of time people spend on the casino floor, the walking areas of a casino are shaped in a curve do that people can't see everything at once and don't feel trapped. This instills a sense of adventure in the patron and leads him/her to spend more time on the floor. In order to make people gamble more, the casino makes use of bright lights because it is suspected that humans are like moths in that we're all attracted to light. Another method casinos get people to gamble is through sounds. If people hear sounds of coins dropping, they feel that they have a fighting chance to win something.

If I knew psychology was so important, I'd probably have taken psychology more seriously.


On a side note, I didn't reach the goal of $10,000 daily profit. In my final run of CHESS, my hotel, Hotel 8A, earned $9,850 daily in profit, which puts my weekly profit average at $68,950.