Last month this site noted the attention to bathrooms given by non-American hotel majors like Accor’s Sofitel. It seems like US hotels too are waking up to the fact that guests, when awake, tend to spend their time not on the bed but in the bathroom. USA Today has a story headlined “Hotels go for splashy new bathrooms”. Spiffing on what goes in and enlarging the bathroom is sure to be a winner. Long a source of complaints, particularly from female travelers, the bathroom tended to be overlooked in terms of space if not quality. While a lack of counter space is the source of much of that ire, other irritants include difficult to access towels and toilet paper besides annoyances such as poor water pressure stemming from sub-par engineering. The article mentions the fact that the “trendy boutique hotel Gansevoort, under construction in Miami’s South Beach, will open in April with 9-by-10-foot bathrooms, twice the size of the common 5-by-8-foot hotel bath”. Obviously, the reporter had not seen the apertures that pass for bathrooms at other trendy places such as the Hudson in New York.
While the larger bathroom is a welcome trend, none, so far, seems to be offering the fixture that is de-rigueur in Europe – the bidet. With all that space, it ought to find a place.