Rinsing Data to Find Europe’s Cleanest Hotels

You have to love research that lumps all hotels in one country in the same pot, but here we go with www.hotel.info’s data crunching of where are the cleanest hotels in Europe.
 
All it takes is one article on one bad hotel in one country for all that country’s hotels to run the risk of suddenly being stigmatized. It’s human nature to pigeonhole, and when choosing one’s next vacation, how easy to cut down on possible destinations by dismissing some carte blanche.
 
That said, let’s see what the report—based on, so the online travel agency claims, reviews from its 2 million customers—has to say.
 
The OTA claims its findings “dispels some myths”—“myths” probably meaning “prejudices,” or perhaps “commonly held, almost comfortable, assumptions.”
 
First one off is that Eastern Europe does extremely well, with Slovakia and Bulgaria taking positions one and two, respectively. Switzerland (prejudices work both ways, the notion being in Switzerland everything is squeaky clean and the trains run on time) also is up in the running, perhaps because there’s less cleaning to be done with prices skyrocketing following the Swiss franc’s decoupling from the euro in January.
 
Positions four, five and six are held by Poland, Austria and Croatia, respectively, so where—I’m now making the usual assumptions about general cleanliness in my own country—I ask, where oh where is the United Kingdom?
 
According to the report, U.K. “hoteliers were not so particular in respect of hygiene. … However, with a score of 7.95 they only just missed achieving a mark of ‘Very Good.’”
 
“Very good”? The U.K. comes in third to last, although last is Denmark, where it’s always been my impression that everything, even dirt, is clean.
 
The least cleansed U.K. city, apparently, is Coventry, which is amusing as we’ve an expression (origin unknown) here that if you are persona non grata you’re said to “be sent to Coventry.”
 
Now we know why.
 
Although to me the most depressing thing about the report’s comment is how closely it mirrors my end-of-year reports at Chislehurst & Sidcup Grammar School.
 
My own completely unscientific research
As I like to keep my mind clean—in my desperate attempt along the lines of the Latin “mens sana in corpore sano”—I have always kept a list of the hotels I have stayed in.
 
This is mostly because I am forgetful, also because it’s fun to see what a hotel today might have been called when I stayed x number of years ago.
 
So, I have an opinion as to the world’s most unclean hotel, and it is in Macau.
 
I chose the Pensão Kao because it was right where I stood when a monsoon hit with a vengeance, and as I did not want my luggage to get soaked, in I went, and after several pregnant-pause minutes when the “hotelier” and I struggled to communicate, I considered it far easier just to book a night.
 
I spent an hour before lights-off killing mosquitoes, blocking a hole (Mosquito Alley) in the broken window in the bathroom and wondering if I would die or not if I turned the shower on (I chose not to), indeed, chose not to touch anything electrical and thus slept with the lights to further help the mosquitoes I failed to liquidate.
 
I am somewhat happy to see that online I can find no trace of dear old Pensão Kao (my editors might flag this as something uncheckable), but I know it existed as I endured a night there and my records of all things geographical and travel-related are anal to say the least.
 
The Hasankeyf Motel in Hasankeyf, Turkey, was “memorable,” too, but as Hasankeyf is one of the best places I’ve been to, with the Tigris River, stunning mausoleum of Zeynel Bey, nesting storks, caves, towers, a mostly ruined bridge built in 1116, friendly people and the calls of the muezzins wafting from its mosques, I will not berate the place’s only lodging option. And because it’s threatened with being flooded to make way for a dam. And because the next town along is called Batman.
 
I did notice that the last review of it on TripAdvisor listed it as “not quite awful,” which is a delightful phrase but equally damning.
 
I think I did better than that at school.
 
Email Terence Baker or find him on Twitter. 
 
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