After 34 years of swiping dirty surfaces, a hotel inspector with AAA is unfazed by the results of her white-glove test. A white-stockings challenge, however, shocked her.
While crawling around the floor of a hotel room, her tights turned a disturbing shade of ick.
“I kept getting on my knees to look under the bed and under things and, at the end of the inspection, I had brown circles on my white pantyhose,” said the Virginia-based inspector, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her job requires that she remain incognito.
TV remotes and light switches regularly appear on lists of the germiest spots in hotel rooms. Carpets, for some inexplicable reason, often get away clean.
The truth, however, will make your plantar skin crawl: Hotel carpeting is a germ trap.
“Carpet and rugs can act as a reservoir for shoe dust, dirt, pollen, mold spores, pesticides and other materials that originated from outside,” said Primrose Freestone, an associate professor in clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester in England.
Harboring foreign particles is only the half of it. Everyday activities — stretching, crawling, walking, dancing, vacuuming — can stir up the microorganisms embedded in the carpet and release them onto your bare feet or clothing, or into the air.
The microbes can be harmless or a health risk, but, for the gross factor alone, guests might want to avoid skin-to-carpet contact.
“You don’t 100 percent know if it’s clean,” said the hotel inspector, who always swaps her street shoes for her “house slippers” whenever she steps inside a hotel room.
Hotel carpeting is teeming with life
For his research on hotels and hygiene, Charles P. Gerba, a professor of virology at the University of Arizona, has discovered life in carpeting.
Gerba said hotel carpets are often flecked with food debris, dead skin cells and dust that engender mites, bacteria, mold, allergens and other microorganisms.
“Carpets are pretty germy,” said Gerba, who never walks barefoot in hotel rooms or hallways.
Guests’ in-room habits, such as eating takeout, brushing their hair or scratching an itch, contribute to the carpet litter. Shoes also drag in an array of vile material, including fecal matter picked up from places where dogs and humans do their business, such as sidewalks, parks and public bathrooms. Guests will disperse the excrement and other organic bits on their journey from lobby to hallway to room.
Though many such microbes are benign, a number of scientific studies, including one helmed by Gerba, have discovered potentially dangerous pathogens stuck to shoe bottoms. For instance, the reports have detected methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a strain of staph bacteria that can cause skin bumps or boils; Escherichia coli, commonly known as E. coli, which can lead to gastrointestinal issues such as stomach cramps and diarrhea; and Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), which can trigger inflammation of the colon.
Sick guests can also contaminate carpets. Gerba cited a norovirus outbreak possibly spread by hotel carpeting. An infected guest threw up on the carpet. Housekeeping vacuumed the bodily fluids, but instead of destroying the virus, the cleaners ended up disseminating it.
“They re-vacuumed with the same vacuum a few days later, and it apparently caused another outbreak,” Gerba said.
And if that doesn’t keep you up at night in your hotel room, this might: Bed bugs may use the carpet as a highway or rest stop to their final destination — you.
Keep the kids off the carpet
For healthy travelers, medical experts say the risk of falling ill from hotel carpeting is low. But people with weaker immune systems or respiratory issues could be susceptible.
“The airborne debris from walked-on under-cleaned carpets can trigger asthma exacerbations, and for asthmatics the American Lung Association recommends against staying in rooms with carpets in favor of easier-to-clean and less allergen or pollutant-trapping hard flooring,” Freestone said.
S. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist Hospital, said children could also be vulnerable because they often play on the floor and put their hands and feet in their mouths, transferring the bacteria and pathogens into their systems. In addition, travelers hobbled by popped blisters or other scrapes should not expose their open sores to hotel carpeting.
“If you have a wound on your foot, you don’t want to be running around on carpet because your native immunity is broken down, and you have an increased risk of infection,” Long said.
For everyone else, hotel carpeting ranks low on the most common ways to contract a bug, far below exposure to a sick individual, poor hand hygiene and contaminated water. However, Long still advises against picnicking on the hotel carpet.
“As long as we keep the stuff on the floor away from our mouths,” he said, “that goes a long way toward preventing illness.”
Vacuuming doesn’t clean
The solution seems easy: Wipe your shoes before entering your hotel room and ensure that housekeeping vacuums daily.
That’s still not enough.
For starters, wiping your shoes on a mat won’t remove the minute particles. Deeper cleaning is required. In Gerba’s study, his team determined that washing your shoes (Rockports in this scenario) in a 12-minute cold cycle using Tide detergent and air drying for 24 hours reduced the number of bacteria on the shoe’s exterior by 99 percent.
However, tracking down a laundromat is not a good use of vacation time, and taking your primary pair of travel shoes out of commission for a day isn’t realistic. A less onerous option is to disinfect your shoes with an antibacterial wipe or to not wear your shoes inside the room.
Standard vacuuming, meanwhile, isn’t hoovering up the detritus ground into the carpeting. To really get the gunk out, the hotel needs to steam clean.
“The challenge is guests are hard on their rooms,” said Lori Mukoyama, a principal and global hospitality leader at Gensler, a global architecture, design and planning firm, “and there is not enough time to do these deep cleans.”
The vacuums can also become repositories — and disseminators — of pathogens and germs. Gerba said salmonella and E. coli can cling to the brushes and bags. If the accessories are not disinfected or changed regularly, they can spray fecal matter and other particles throughout the hotel.
In a study published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, Gerba and his colleagues noted that “environmental surfaces can act as both reservoirs and sources of airborne pathogens due to re-aerosolization during routine activities such as walking or vacuuming.”
Gerba’s advice: If housekeeping is vacuuming, don’t follow in their wake.
Better flooring options
Though carpets are undisputed germ sponges, the flooring style isn’t going the way of the lobby cigarette vending machine or pay phone. The textile still serves a purpose, such as muting guest noises.
“Carpet helps absorb sound, reduce footfall noise and create a quieter guest experience in high-traffic areas,” said Valentina Castellon, principal and hospitality interior design leader with DLR Group, an international design firm. “While advances in underlayments and acoustic assemblies have improved the performance of hard-surface flooring, carpet continues to play an important role where noise control is essential.”
Since the pandemic, when hygiene awareness was at an all-time high, hotel designers say the trend toward hard materials has accelerated. Castellon said luxury vinyl tile, porcelain tile and engineered wood are simpler to clean, more resistant to staining and less likely to retain odors. For a homey touch, hotels may sprinkle some area rugs around the room, which are also germ traps but easier than carpeting to clean and replace or, if you’re a guest, walk around or jump over.
Travelers averse to carpeting can seek out hotels that incorporate these less fraught materials and decorative styles. Mukoyama said when she visits New York City, she will stay in a capsule room in a micro-hotel, which uses luxury vinyl tiles. Many high-end hotels, such as Four Seasons, feature wood flooring with accent rugs.
Meanwhile, for properties with carpeting, Mukoyama said she will pull out her secret weapon: black socks.
“I don’t wear white ones, because I honestly don’t want to know,” she said.
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