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I am doing some temporary work for a few months and the company is paying for my housing in a nearby hotel. The room comes with typical housekeeping service to clean the sheets, bathroom, etc. I have been noticing that the walls of the shower are starting to turn pink, and when housekeeping comes through they have not been cleaning the walls.

I could clean them myself, as the houskeeping is certainly a great perk, but there are no cleaning materials in the room and I don't really want to go buy some only to throw it away half-used in a few weeks.

How can I ask for the shower to be more thoroughly cleaned without getting the housekeeper in trouble or offending them? Service workers do not have very easy lives, and this person will also be in my room a few times a week for another two months. I have considered leaving a note on my table.

Additional details: this is in the United States and many of the housekeepers don't speak much English. I usually get the room cleaned 2x per week. I have been leaving a tip of $5 USD per week.

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this looks like a phrasing request. – sphennings Jul 23 '18 at 17:18
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    Have you seen the housekeeper in person, or is there a person you can speak to that manages housekeeping? – ElizB Jul 23 '18 at 17:30
  • i would suggest asking at travel.stackexchange.com mentioning country/region of your visit. It might have cultural differences in how to ask – aaaaa says reinstate Monica Jul 23 '18 at 18:25
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because should be moved to travel.stackexchange.com – aaaaa says reinstate Monica Jul 23 '18 at 18:28
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It's probably best to ask for assistance with specific things, because "please clean better" isn't super useful if they don't realize they're missing something to begin with. On top of that, if you're looking for something specific to be cleaned (like your shower), there's a chance they'll clean something else better and ignore the thing you were hoping to have cleaned more thoroughly.

Call the front desk and ask them to pass the message along.

Hello, I'm calling from room X. Is it possible for you to ask the cleaning crew to pay extra attention to X, Y, and Z when they clean tomorrow? Thanks very much!

Don't worry about giving a reason, just ask them to pay closer attention. You won't be able to change how the message is communicated to the staff anyways, so it's important to be clear here.

If you don't want to go through the front desk (though you should - their job is specifically to handle issues like this), then you could try writing something in a note about it. I assume you're leaving a note with your tip explaining that it is indeed a tip (it would be weird for a cleaning staff to just take loose bills lying around), so that would be a good place to put this request.

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  • I did ask the front desk twice. They claimed it was cleaned, but was definitely still growing stuff. I ended up sacrificing a towel to somewhat clean it myself. – CAJ Jul 31 '18 at 14:24
  • It probably was cleaned - just not very well. In this scenario in the future, it would probably be wise to take a wet tissue or something and scrub a line through the middle of the offending area. Take a picture and bring it down and show them what you mean. High-volume hotels are likely to get a ton of customers complaining about benign stuff, so when you have an actual issue, your bet is to show them that there's an actual problem to be solved. Either way, glad you were able to figure out a fix! – Kulahan Jul 31 '18 at 14:44

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