From Stanley Turkel’s “Nobody Asked Me, But . . . “ column in Hotel-Online.com
In April 2006, I reported on the progress made in my one-man crusade to eliminate unused bathtubs from hotel bathrooms. At the time, Marriott was building shower-only rooms for its new Marriott and Renaissance hotels. Now it appears that the hotel bathtub is going down the drain. Sofitel, Hilton, Park Hyatt, Indigo, Embassy Suites, Staybridge Suites, Gansevoort and Manhattan’s Shoreham have all renovated with walk-in showers.
Professor Dott. Antonio P. Adamo, professor of engineering at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and at the Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, reports on the reasons for the end of the bathtub in hotels:
- To take a bath takes time
- Baths are “relaxing” while showers are “stimulating”
- Many hotel guests (especially ladies) doubt (wrongly) that the hotel bathtubs are perfectly clean….they nurture paranoid worries about germs, fungi and other assorted contaminants that can hardly be considered relaxing.
- ….to take a bath, bathtubs must be filled with 200 to 300 liters of water, hot water, that is… The “total bath-time cycle” seldom takes less than half an hour.
- ….the shower-head’s water flow for vigorous action is, at most, 15 liters per minute… when you finish, usually less than 5 to 7 minutes later, you have drained 75 to 105 liters of water, roughly one half what is needed for a bath.
Furthermore, the tub-shower combination is dangerous to use and becomes a target for lawsuits and higher insurance premiums. And, just incidentally, the shower-only bathroom saves on the cost of shower curtains.