Hotels have been renting rooms to weary travelers for years, and while they tend to be pretty good at the hospitality business, on the whole, it can be particularly maddening when they fail at the small details. I am confident that every large hotel chain employs people whose job is to ensure that the rooms themselves are well-appointed and comfortable. I would also assume that these individuals have some training and accrued experience with interior design, including the selection of furniture and fixtures. In most hotels, it is safe to expect budget-level interior design. Unless I’m splurging for the 5-star accommodation, not everything in the room will be top-of-the-line. The art will invariably be pedestrian, the remote control will work randomly as it sees fit, and the shower fixtures will be a usability enigma requiring several minutes of trial and error to find an acceptable combination of pressure and temperature that will get you passably clean without scalding your skin from your body.
I’ve gotten used to all these things. Still, on a recent hotel stay, I came across the single most unforgivable design flaw I’ve ever encountered in a hotel room: unusable power sockets. For years at the start of the computer age, hotels had yet to upgrade their in-room power receptacles to account for the proliferation of personal devices that required access to plugs at multiple locations throughout the room (not just a single desk-adjacent 2-plug outlet). Now that they seem to have grasped the need for an overabundance of outlets, charging your phone within arm’s reach of the bed while your laptop remains plugged in on the desk is no longer just a pipe dream. Great. About time. This is what makes my recent experience so frustrating. As shown in the picture above, the room I was in was equipped with lamps on either side of the king-size bed, each with two outlets apiece (excellent!) Except that the design of the lamp itself made plugging anything into the outlets utterly impossible. To be fair, whoever manufactured these crimes against usability is mainly at fault, but did no one from the hotel procurement team think to QA these objects for functional suitability before purchasing what I can only assume would be hundreds, if not thousands, of them?
There is more than enough incompetence involved here to allow me to spread my dissatisfaction around thoroughly, but that still doesn’t help me charge my phone overnight. Good design is in the details; we ignore them at our peril.
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