What does a double room mean to you? I’m fairly sure that by any reasonable definition, it means a room with one bed big enough for two people. What it most certainly isn’t is a room with two beds pushed together. That is a twin room for people who have a peculiar attitude towards physical proximity.
So why do I keep coming across hotels that think it’s perfectly OK to push two beds together and call it a double? It’s not – it’s just a tight-arsed non-solution that makes precisely nobody happy. For couples, it means a nasty great split down the middle that someone either acts as a post-coital barricade or ensures that one poor soul has to lie in the ridge.
And then, of course, if either party has the temerity to move at any stage, the beds shift with them, creating an even larger crevasse.
No publicity
I’ve long had a policy of not giving publicity to any hotel that does this. If I’m writing an article about somewhere, I will never include a hotel that does calls two singles a double, even if the establishment put me up for free. It’s simply not good enough, and I’m staggered that so many hotels think they can get away with it.
Continental Europe tends to be the worst place for this – I’ve come across it in pretty much every country, with France and Italy being particularly bad offenders.
False claim
Pushing two singles together and calling it a double is making a false claim on the key aspect of a hotel’s product. This wouldn’t be allowed in any other industry. An estate agent can’t advertise a large house that’s actually two small houses with a big wall in the middle. A clothes store can’t try and sell four little shoes as a pair of big shoes. A furniture store can’t sellotape two chairs together and call it a sofa.
Buying unseen
But hotels can get away with it, largely because it’s an industry where products are bought unseen, and there’s that certain expectation amongst customers that they’ll get the odd duff one. Refuse to take the room upon seeing the beds, and there’s not a lot of room for manoeuvre – even if a refund is possible, there’s then the rigmarole of finding somewhere else.
It’s a sad state of affairs; let’s just hope a wee bit of Darwinism occurs and that the hotels trying to make two become one are driven out of business by lack of custom.
Tags: beds, France, hotel, Italy, marketing, Travel Industry
At my hotel in Austria, the bed was a sort of wooden frame, which would accommodate one or two mattresses. Since I’d booked a single room, only one mattress was provided and the bed made up as a single.
On the second the (very attractive) lady from the TIC in Innsbruck drove out with some stuff for me. We had a coffee, and she asked if she could have dinner there, which she did.
After dinner, she went home, and I went to my room … to find the bed had been remade as a double!
Service, or what?
This is straight deceit in my view and one of my pet hates. As you said, it seems to be more popular in some countries of mainland Europe and also in parts of South America.