A cart sits in the hallway. It is filled to the brim with clean towels, coffee, shampoo, trash bags, duster, cleaning solution and a mop. Inside room 506, Maria goes through her cleaning ritual. She folds a washcloth in an accordion pattern and fits it neatly into a newly changed towel. She progresses through the bathroom, washing the tub and sink, cleaning the mirrors and mopping the floor. Then she moves to the bedroom, remaking the king-size bed and fluffing the pillows. No detail is overlooked; she even changes all the blinds to the same angle. After quickly vacuuming the floor, she is finished. She puts all her cleaning supplies back in her cart and wheels it to the next room, leaving 506 locked behind her.
Maria is a housekeeper at Lawrence’s historic Eldridge Hotel, 7th and Massachusetts streets. She is one maid of many who clean the hotel’s 48 rooms every day. Unlike other hotels, the Eldridge has a special policy: the general manager must check the rooms for cleanliness every day.
“The girls will do a better job if they know someone is checking their rooms,” said Nancy Longhurst, the Eldridge Hotel’s general manager.
The Eldridge’s stringent and unique approach to overall cleanliness means that no one has complained about the hotel to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment this year.
This is not the case for some other lodging establishments in town. Guests have reported exceptionally dirty and unkempt rooms in nine hotels in Lawrence since January 2007. For these hotels and others that may not abide by such careful cleaning rules, a harsh reality may soon set in. In the past, hotels have only been inspected if a guest complained to the state. Now that has changed. The state health department began annual inspections of all hotels in Kansas this year.
Previous years have meant hotel inspections only when needed. Before now, these inspections fell to people already employed as restaurant inspectors because the funds were not available to hire specialized inspectors. But in May 2007, the Kansas Legislature passed the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, allocating $246,616 and four inspector positions specifically for hotel inspections. Mary Glassburner, Director of Bureau of Consumer Health for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, supervises the new program.
“We asked for funds so we could inspect our lodging establishments the way we feel they should be inspected: they should be clean, safe and comfortable,” Glassburner said. “We have discovered several problems that have popped up. We have a bed bug problem in the state and we want to establish education about the subject.”
The program will have four inspectors based in Lawrence, Wichita, Salina and Topeka. Each will inspect roughly a fourth of the 780 lodging establishments in Kansas, or 195 hotels a year. The inspectors will follow training and field-testing the state health department provided in their inspections.
Springhill Suites, 1 Riverfront Plaza, is one of the hotels inspectors checked this year. Although the manager said the reason for the visit was the statewide bed bug infestation, inspectors discovered other problems in this Marriott-owned hotel. Hairs on mattress pads, trash on floors of rooms and low water pressure are among the items listed on the state health department’s inspection report. These issues are not as problematic as they may seem, insist general manager Michael Moore. The trash was probably a small piece of paper in a corner that the vacuum missed and the hairs weren’t plentiful, he said.
“It’s not like the mattresses looked like a dog had been dragged across them,” Moore said.
Moore thinks the inspections will make hotels a little more aware of how clean their rooms are, pushing employees to look for smaller items like trash in the corners or a smudge on a light switch that may not be on a normal cleaning list. Hotels can’t spend too much more time on rooms, he said. They have to find a balance between spotless rooms and long hours for maids.
“I don’t think any hotel will ever be 100 percent clean,” Moore said.
The Hallmark Inn, 730 Iowa St., is another hotel inspected in 2007. In January, stains were found on chairs, box springs and mattresses and mold was on the caulking. Since this report, the hotel’s management has changed. Now the hotel is working on renovations, partly because of the inspections.
“We are taking into consideration inspections from different agencies. The purpose of our renovation is to improve overall appearance and quality of our product,” said Art Kato, vice president of the hotel.
Kato said the hotel is reinforcing the structure of the hotel before updating the vanity items like bedding and chairs. Tile, sheetrock and walls are the hotel’s first concern. Once that renovation is complete, the hotel will buy bedding, drapes, chairs and lamps, the items that were listed as stained on the inspector’s report.
Both hotels are taking steps to clean up after less-than-favorable inspections. Now these hotels and every other hotel will be held accountable each year with an unannounced inspection from the state department. Eldridge Hotel manager Nancy Longhurst is not worried.
“I think annual inspections will be a great thing for the hotel industry,” Longhurst said. “For us, it would be great because we already adhere to all the standards they would inspect.”
She was right. Last week, inspectors visited the Eldridge Hotel. They checked eight rooms, and none had violations.
Maria will keep cleaning hotel rooms the way she always has, but now she cleans not only for the guests and a manager but also for the state health inspector. Every time she cleans a room, her work could be inspected and the hotel could be written up. As long as she keeps up her quality work, follows her routine and the manager checks her room, the Eldridge Hotel and Maria should be just fine. The annual inspections mean other hotels will have to start matching her standards.