5 Clever Hotel Room Hacks for a Safer, More Comfortable Stay

If only every hotel could feel like your home away from home, where cleanliness and comfort were givens and a safe, quiet night’s sleep was guaranteed. But, alas, even the best hotels can lack features that you’d expect—or at least hope for—in a hotel stay. Necessity is the mother of invention, however, and travelers can be incredibly inventive when it comes to MacGyver-ing hotel room conveniences. To find out just how inventive, we tapped our well-traveled friends, family members, colleagues, and the internet community at large to bring you these clever hotel hacks that could make all the difference—as in a good night’s rest versus no rest at all—in your next hotel stay.

1. Avoid bed bugs by placing your luggage in the bathtub.

Safety comes in many forms, including protecting yourself from bed bugs. While you may not be able to send bed bugs a-packing, you can at least prevent them from seeking refuge in your personal belongings—or even worse, on you.

Not only should you avoid flopping yourself on the hotel bed upon entering your room, but you should also resist flinging your luggage on the bed. That’s worth repeating: Do not put your luggage on your hotel bed. Also, don’t place it on the carpet, on couches or cushioned chairs, in dresser drawers, or even on a luggage rack before carefully inspecting all the nooks and crannies of your new surroundings.

Instead, place your luggage in the empty bathtub (or on another hard surface), where bed bugs cannot hide. Then, with your phone’s flashlight, check for creepy-crawlies (here’s what bed bugs look like, courtesy of the EPA) and any signs that they leave behind, including reddish (blood) stains, dark (excrement) spots, and pale-yellow eggs and eggshells (exoskeletons).

Bed bugs like dark, cramped spaces. So, be sure to examine the mattress and boxspring, including near the piping, seams and tags, as well as any cracks in the bed frame and headboard, including taking an extra-good look at the headboard if it’s upholstered. Also, check the seams of fabric furnishings (including luggage racks and ironing boards), in between cushions, in dresser drawer joints, in the creases of curtains, and in electrical receptacles and appliances, among other places.

Using hardshell luggage and storing your belongings—or your entire suitcase—in resealable plastic bags also helps protect your stuff from bed bugs. Keep clean and dirty clothes separate, too, as bed bugs also like dirty hiding spots.

2. Block germs by repurposing the shower cap or ice bucket liner.

When you think about the dirtiest places in a hotel room, you likely think the toilet seat. While any commode can be a germ magnet, it tends to be one of the most thoroughly cleaned items in a hotel room. The more clandestine culprit for dirtiest item in a hotel room is the TV remote. In fact, studies shows that the frequently touched TV remote often harbors more bacteria than the toilet seat. For real.

No disinfecting wipes? No problem. Use the shower cap from your hotel toiletry supply or your room’s ice bucket liner to cover the remote. The controls are usable through the plastic, and the barrier will prevent you from picking up more than some free channels.

If you plan to use the ice bucket, however, a word of caution: Do not borrow the bucket liner for the remote. You’ll want to use that liner for its intended purpose since the ice bucket also ranks high among the dirtiest items in a hotel room. Why? While you wouldn’t want to imagine that guests could use the ice bucket as a vessel for vomit, it happens. And more often than you might think.

Another good use for the shower cap: Use it to cover your shoes before repacking them back in your luggage.

3. Increase your safety with sticky notes, Band-Aids, clothes hangers, or binder clips.

Hanging the Do Not Disturb sign when you're in your room as well as when you’re not in your room but want to give it a lived-in look to signal to housekeeping, maintenance, or anyone else—including would-be thieves—not to enter is a no-brainer. But when you’re in the room and want to add an extra layer of security beyond your door’s deadbolt and latch locks—and you didn’t bring a doorstop, portable door lock, or door handle alarm—there are still some measures you can take to thwart thieves and other bad actors.

The peephole on your hotel room door is designed to allow you to see who’s outside your door, but in some cases, people outside your door may also be able to peek inside your room. You can block the peephole, however, in a rather old-school way by stuffing your hotel room stationery, a tissue, or even toilet paper in the peephole or covering it with a sticky note or Band-Aid.

Along those lines, your curtains also allow you to see (or not see) outside your room, but conversely, curtains that don’t close completely let people see in—and that could be a privacy concern. A quick fix: Grab the hangers with clips from the hotel closet, and fasten them to eliminate any gaps in the drapes. Should your hotel have binder clips, they’ll also do the job in a…ahem, pinch.

4. Improvise conveniences using a towel, ironing board, cup, and shower steam

Along with providing privacy, those handy hangers with clips can also help obstruct any light streaming through the cracks of the curtains when you’re trying to get some shut-eye. Same goes for a rolled-up towel at the bottom of the door to block out light as well as reduce noise seeping in from the hallway.

Need some extra table space in your room? Place a clean towel on the ironing board and—voila!—you have more desk or dining space. If your ironing board is now a table or you don’t like ironing period, use the steam from your hot shower to unwrinkle your clothes by simply hanging them in the bathroom.

And while using glassware from the hotel room kitchen area as a makeshift toothbrush holder may be a common practice, it isn’t always the cleanest option—as every now and then lipstick stains on glass rims can attest. Instead, take a packaged plastic cup, poke a hole in the bottom, turn it upside down, and—presto!—you have enjoy an instant holder that’s not only germ-free but shatter-proof.

5. Create a checkout reminder with the strategic placement of a shoe

Your hotel room safe is often the most secure place to store your important belongings: your wallet, your passport, your extra car keys, and so on. Those are the very things that you don’t want to leave behind in your hotel room upon checkout, but many travelers do just that. Out of sight, out of mind, after all.

To help you remember these things, put one of your shoes—from the pair that you’ll be wearing home on checkout day—in the safe with your belongings. Since you won’t be walking out the door wearing one shoe, you likely won’t be leaving without your wallet, passport, or extra set of keys, either.

Even the ingenious secret agent MacGyver—who, in many a TV episode, solved an impossible situation with little more than duct tape, paper clips, a wad of gum, and his wits—would be impressed.