The keycard beeps, the door swings open, and your hand goes to the wall before you have even set the bag down. That little plastic switch by the door is the first thing almost every guest touches and close to the last thing anybody wipes. Inspectors who swab hotel rooms for a living keep landing on it. An inspector for AAA told The Washington Post that the remote used to be the worst offender, and is not anymore: “When we first started swabbing, the remote control was the germiest, but now it is not as much. It’s usually the light switch at the front door that tends to fail the most for me.”
So that switch is the thing to leave alone until a disinfecting wipe has been across it. Four seconds, and then keep going, because the switch has plenty of company in that room.
The 90-Second Wipe-Down, In The Order That Makes Sense
Hotel staff often spend about 30 minutes tidying and cleaning each room, and decorative items may be skipped entirely, Enza Laterrenia, head of housekeeping at Canne Bianche Lifestyle Hotel in Italy, told Travel + Leisure. Half an hour covers the bed, the bathroom, the trash and the vacuum. It does not cover the thermostat.
Pack a flat travel pack of disinfecting wipes. Clorox and Lysol both sell them in packs that slide into a carry-on pocket, and Walmart, Target and most drugstores keep them near the travel-size section for a couple of bucks. Do the room in one lap so you are not walking back and forth: switch by the door, deadbolt and inside door handle, lamp switch and lamp base by the bed, remote, phone, desk, thermostat, the charging ports on the nightstand, then the bathroom faucet handles, the flush lever and the counter.
LaDell Carter, founder of the Maryland-based agency Royal Expression Travels, told Fox News Digital that a dusty charging port next to the bed or a bedside lamp caked in residue tells her the basics got done and the details got missed. She is right, and the same logic applies in reverse. Curtain rods, ceiling fans and shower heads sit outside the 30 minutes too, which is why Laterrenia flags them.
The Remote Control And The Sandwich Bag Trick
Buttons and crevices are nearly impossible to wipe properly in a hurry, which is why the remote keeps showing up near the top of every swab list ever run. A hotel hygiene study by TravelMath, which swabbed nine hotels, found the average room carried more bacteria than a typical home, an airplane or a school. The bathroom counter came out as the most contaminated surface on average. In five-star rooms, the remote took first place instead.
A 2012 University of Houston study of nine hotel rooms found 81% of the surfaces tested carried at least some fecal bacteria.
Easiest fix in this whole article: drop the remote in a gallon zip-top bag and leave it there. The buttons work fine through plastic, and you never have to think about it again. Wipe the bedside lamp switch while you are at it. The same Houston study found high levels of bacteria on that switch, and it is the one you grab in the dark at 2 a.m.
Throw Pillows And The Bed Runner Go Straight To The Corner
Decorative pillows and that strip of fabric across the foot of the bed do not go through the wash with the sheets. Maria Diego, a San Diego, California-based travel adviser who has worked in hotels, flings both into a far corner of the room the minute she walks in. “These never get washed,” she said. The AAA inspector feels the same way about decorative pillows. “They are super germy,” she said.
The comforter is the bigger one, since it covers you all night. Kelly Reynolds, an environmental health professor at the University of Arizona, said guests are better off avoiding contact with the bedspread: “A lot of people will recommend just folding the bedspread back or throwing it on the chair and don’t use it while you’re there.” If the room runs cold, call the front desk and ask for an extra flat sheet or a laundered blanket.
Pillowcases are worth a thought too. A hidden-camera investigation by NBC’s TODAY show found three New Jersey hotels did not change all the bed linens even when guests asked, with one housekeeper setting bed pillows on a chair and putting them back in the same cases. A two-pack of pillowcases from Walmart weighs almost nothing in a suitcase and takes 10 seconds to swap.
The Drinking Glasses Next To The Sink
Eleven of 15 hotels across the country failed to properly clean and sanitize their drinking glasses in a 2008 round of undercover investigations by ABC News stations. In Arizona, where the state health code requires those glasses to be cleaned and sanitized, three of the four hotels examined failed. Cameras caught housekeepers drying glasses with a dirty hand towel, rinsing and wiping them with a rag, and in one Cincinnati, Ohio hotel, spraying them with what appeared to be Lysol mildew remover.
Nobody needs to swear off water for three days over it. Use the wrapped paper cups if the room has them, bring a refillable bottle, or wash the glass yourself with hot water and the hand soap before you pour anything into it. Carter said she never uses a mug or glass in a room without rinsing it first. “It’s not about fear, it’s about good habits,” she added.
The Coffee Maker, The Pot, And The Kettle
The same Cincinnati housekeeper who sprayed the glasses with mildew remover gave the coffee pot a coat of it too, the ABC investigation found.
The machines themselves rarely get descaled. Researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain swabbed 10 home and office Nespresso machines and found bacteria growing in every one, with two types “moderately to highly abundant” in nine of them. Charles Gerba, professor of microbiology and environmental sciences at the University of Arizona, has warned that housekeepers can carry germs from room to room as they clean.
Run a full cycle with plain water and dump it before you brew anything. For electric kettles, which almost never get cleaned on the inside, wash the pot and the handle with hot water and dish soap first, then boil a full load and pour it out. Or walk down to the lobby and let somebody else’s machine be the problem.
Those Big Refillable Shampoo Bottles In The Shower
Wall-mounted dispensers have replaced the little bottles in most chains, and they get topped off rather than emptied and scrubbed. Gerba has studied what grows in them. “Bacterial growth is an issue with refillable dispenser use for soap and shampoos,” he said. Coliform bacteria can survive in soap and multiply, and the numbers drop after a refill before climbing again.
Tampering is the other half of it. Any dispenser that is not locked into a key-operated housing can be opened by whoever had the room last, and travel writer Gary Leff has reported that hotel staff raise this as a real concern. Leff is also blunt about why the switch happened in the first place: “They say it’s for the environment, but it isn’t,” he wrote, arguing that chains chasing purely green goals would have moved to biodegradable single-use packaging instead.
The bottles are not going back. California banned the little single-use bottles in 2019, phased in for hotels in 2023 and 2024, New York followed in 2021 with a ban that took effect in 2025, and Washington passed its own in 2023. Fill your own 3-ounce bottles at home from the big shampoo in your shower, or grab a travel set from the Dollar Tree or Target travel aisle. A bar of soap in a plastic tin covers body wash and solves the problem for about a dollar. Bringing your own containers is the cleanest answer and the cheapest one.
Ice Bucket, Phone, And The Carpet Inside The Door
Ice buckets get used as general containers, not just for ice. Brian Labus, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, has pointed to a hotel norovirus outbreak that spread partly through ice buckets sick guests had vomited into. Use the plastic liner, every time. If there is no liner at the ice machine, skip the bucket and buy a bag of ice.
The room phone almost nobody uses and almost nobody cleans. Rani Cheema, a Los Angeles travel adviser, said the receiver is what grosses her out most in a hotel room. “No one’s cleaning that,” she said. One wipe, or lay a tissue over it if you have to make a call.
Then there is the floor. A researcher at the University of Houston’s hotel school said the patch of carpet right in front of the door is one of the worst spots in the room, because every guest walks in off the street, and it gets vacuumed but rarely deep cleaned. Pack a pair of slip-on slippers or cheap flip-flops and wear them from the bed to the bathroom. The AAA inspector gives the same advice, and she also steers clear of sleeper sofas.
What Goes In The Bag, And When To Call Downstairs
The whole kit fits in one gallon zip-top bag: a travel pack of disinfecting wipes, two spare zip-top bags, your own shampoo and soap, slip-on slippers, and a pillowcase if you are picky about where your face goes. Everything on that list comes from Walmart, Target or the dollar store, and it all weighs less than a pair of shoes.
Skip the long soak. A swab test by WaterFilterGuru.com, a water filter seller, found one hotel bathtub carried 40 times more bacteria than a toilet seat, and experts say jetted tubs are the worst of the bunch because the lines behind the jets do not get disinfected. Diego will not take a bath in a hotel unless it is a super-luxe five-star property, and only then if the tub has no jets. Shower and move on.
If the room looks wrong when you walk in, say so. The front desk can send housekeeping back up or move you to a different room, and that costs you one phone call. Of everything in here, the switch by the door is still the one to keep your bare hand off until the wipes come out, because you reach for it before you have had a single second to look around.
