Rightly or wrongly, I let my hotel experience dictate the degree to which I enjoy any trip. I’m not one of those, “I just need a place to nap and will spend most of my time enjoying the locale,” type of people. No matter how little time I spend in my room, when I’m there, I want to be able to bask without reserve.

Here, I want to chronicle the chief hotel hang ups I’ve encountered over the years:

Get rid of the spread. Today, most hotels have gone all white. The bed is topped with an immaculate duvet and pillowcases and there’s only a narrow coverlet at the end of the bed, which never has to touch your body. Now, that we’ve all been CSI desensitized to all of the semen, urine, fecal matter and other disgusting substances that can invisibly coat hotel surfaces, just waiting to be exposed under ultra-violet light, we appreciate the transparency. The more white the linens, the easier it is to assure ourselves that the place is not teeming with unseen bacteria. So, for those hotels who have yet to get with the program, ditch the loudly-colored bedspread. We all now know that those only exist as camouflage to mask the unthinkable.

• Stop mingling the filthy with the clean. Hopefully, linens and towels are washed after each guest. But my hopes for the sanitization of the cushions, throws and literature (like the recycling and conservation placards today’s hotels leave around the room) are not so high. So, please don’t plop these questionable items that might have been touched by 200 people before me onto my clean pillows and face rags! You may think a throw pillow livens the décor, but all it does is make me wonder if the last person who laid against it had lice. Keep that stuff off the bed. Also, try to make sure the face rag isn’t touching anything else in the bathroom. I don’t want material that will touch my eyes, nose, and mouth laying on a bathroom counter that has been only marginally cleaned, at best. Since hotels can never manage to clean the shower stall of all the stray hairs (pubic and otherwise) the last guest left behind, I don’t trust it to disinfect other areas of the bathroom either. So, try to keep face rags somewhere that doesn’t make me certain their freedom from yuck has been compromised.
• Isolate the Toilet. We all saw that Oprah or news expose program which revealed that the spray that rises whenever someone flushes the toilet can spread for miles — or at least several feet — contaminating everything nearby. The commode may be feet away from toothbrush and towels, but when during the rush of the flush, tiny particles fly everywhere, filling the room with small droplets of human waste. Please minimize the damage. If at all possible, wall or partition the toilet off from the rest of the bathroom. Obviously, not all hotels have the space or money to do this, but if that’s the case, please provide a cabinet, box or other enclosure for the towels, so I can separate them from theeau de toilette spray.
• Europe, make the toilet handle accessible. Many European hotels inexplicably place the button used to flush the toilet behind the lid. Yes, this provides a nice solution to the toilet spray terror, but it creates the problem. It increases the times I have to touch a dubious toilet lid. I wash my hands after each bathroom use, but I still don’t want to have to lift and lower the lid repeatedly, exposing myself to the germs that coat it. We fight with men enough over having to put down the toilet seat, don’t make the lid part of the problem. At home, I may choose to keep the lid closed in the guest bathroom, but in my personal bath, I don’t go to the trouble. I certainly don’t need your questionable placement of the toilet handle to force me to keep it closed when I’m traveling.
• Ice. Always provide a plastic baggy for the ice bucket. Most hotels do, but for those who don’t, unless you can prove to me that you wash the ice bucket after each guest, don’t make me put my ice in an uncovered one.
• Accessories. Check tv remote batteries every three months to make sure they’re functioning. Clean telephones, remotes and menus after each guest. I’ll still Purell everything in sight, as soon as I check in, but at least I won’t feel quite as anxious about having to do so.
• Don’t hide your parking price. Many of the hotel booking services like Hotwire and Priceline, not only fail to list the cost for parking in their hotel listings, but they forbid patrons from mentioning it when they rate the hotels. In cities like San Francisco, you can pay $100s in parking and you have the right to find that out beforehand, so you can budget accordingly. Why try to keep it a secret from those specifically looking for a discount. Of course, Priceline and Hotwire bear the most responsibility for conspiring with the hotels to keep this secret. If I have to call the hotel directly to find out how much parking is per night, then I’ll just book directly with the hotel. If an online broker can’t tell me how much I’ll really be spending, then they aren’t really offering me a service.
• Hail a Cab! Some hotels must get kickbacks from private car surfaces, because instead of calling a cab when you ask them, they push a car on you. Only, they’re not honest about what you’re doing. Sometimes, they pretend that the cab just hasn’t shown up yet, knowing that when you’re in a rush for the airport, you aren’t going to wait long. Sometimes, they just surprise you. When the car shows up while you’re still waiting for the cab, they ask, “What’s the difference? The price is the same.” Well, it’s not. Sometimes private cars offer a flat rate that is competitive, but most of the times they’ll cost more than a cab. Look hotels, if I paid for your room, food and other services don’t try to rip me off by forcing me to use a third party vendor with whom you’ve made some sort of a deal If I want a private car, I’ll ask for. There are sometimes security issues with the private car drivers, who may or may not have been screened as well as the cab drivers (not that they all have clean histories either). Aside from angering hotel patrons, I’d also advise you that colluding with the private car companies could make you liable if they somehow cause injury to the passengers you basically booked for them. Hotels, if you’re acting like an agent for the private car company: (1) disclose that fact to your hotel guests, and (2) be ready to be treated like the car company’s agent under the law, should anything go wrong.