Thread by @AlexandraErin

A while back I was staying in a hotel. I'm not going to name the change and please don't play guessing games in my mentions, I don't want corporate attention on this thread for reasons that may become apparent.

But this was a hotel chain that had some attention on here earlier in the year about an "anti-trafficking" campaign that was actually anti-sex work, and functioned by targeting women drinking or traveling alone.

We were there because of the combination of location and the deal we could get. This was short notice travel for family stuff and so it wasn't my normal first choice.

Anywhoodle. My partner and I have very different sleep schedules. At that point I was waking up at six in the morning, every morning, just like on the dot. So I would go downstairs and have breakfast, and then later he would do the same thing, most days.

And so it tended to work out that we had the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door in the hours of the morning when housekeeping came through our hall, which is not a big deal, right? They come back and get those rooms later.

Buuut the first day, they never came by.

Okay, I thought. We must have been in the room when they came back, too. We're adults. We can call for service if we need it.

Second day, same thing. We were out of towels at that point so I went down to the desk to politely ask for them. "Oh, did housekeeping miss you?"

"We've been under the weather so we were sleeping most of the day," I lied, like a liar. I want towels, not to make trouble.

Housekeeping never came by while we were there.

Why not?

According to an overheard conversation towards the end of our stay: any notes they keep on people who have the Do Not Disturb sign up go to the cops. So they weren't keeping notes.

This is what hotel chains "cooperating" against "trafficking" looks like.

We never got housekeeping service (but I am an adult and know how to ask for things, if it had been a problem I would have asked the desk to send someone around) but we left a nice big tip when we departed anyway.

No ethical consumption under late, etc., but I'm not super keen on going back to that chain any time soon. I think they're all liable to violate our privacy at official request but this one is pretty pro-active about it.

I think the idea started off as "people who decline housekeeping service may have something to hide" and then morphed because someone who has something to hide isn't going to yell "GO AWAY!" when housekeeping knocks, they'll just keep the Do Not Disturb sign up.

Some people are confused. Let me try explaining again:

Normal course of things is, they go down the hall and do all the rooms, except the rooms where they have the Do Not Disturb Sign up or someone is in there and asks them to come back later.

Normally, they'd note those rooms.

And then later in the day they'd do another sweep and catch the rooms that were occupied/DND'd.

Some hotels explicitly have a "Service Please" flag on the reverse of the Do Not Disturb sign, but this one did not.

But this hotel chain had started taking the housekeeping notes and giving them (maybe routinely, maybe only when one seems "suspicious", who knows?) to the authorities, so at least some of the housekeepers had stopped making notes.

So the upshot of that was, if you missed the first go-round, you might not get picked up again.

I had to go to the desk a few more times, but I just kept up the "not feeling well" story.

It wasn't hard, I was genuinely getting over a bad cold.

The front desk staff were wonderful. Housekeeping was wonderful. The policies, though.

Like I said: I did my best to not get anyone in trouble, as they were only doing their best to not get anyone in trouble.

Anyway. No big moral here, except maybe Google if a hotel chain has some kind of big "anti-trafficking" policy. There are bargain hotels that turn records over to CBP/ICE and there are higher end hotels that do this kind of thing.

And also, while you should always treat the desk staff at a hotel with friendliness and courtesy, please be careful how you talk to them about something regarding housekeeping. Implying they forgot something or did something wrong can have repercussions.