It’s a top guest complaint but many hotels can’t fix it

By Jeanne Bonner, CNN

(CNN) — On a work trip to Mississippi last year, Jason GaNun wound up trying three different hotel rooms to get some peace and quiet before a busy day — and none of them did the trick.

In the first one, he said the “ancient” air conditioning unit was one of the loudest he’d ever encountered. When he moved to the second room, it was the refrigerator noise that got in the way of sleeping. And next to the third room he tried, other hotel guests were throwing a party.

“I could hear everything they were doing,” said GaNun, a project manager for a demolition company in Pennsylvania who travels every other week for work.

For Lindsey Maness, the menace during one hotel stay for work in Austin, Texas, was a noisy elevator near her room. Seven months pregnant at the time, Maness could hear the “dinging” of the elevators opening and closing all night. That wasn’t the only issue.

“The walls were paper thin, and I could hear people in the room adjacent … chatting until very late in the night,” said Maness, who now works for the National Sleep Foundation. Far and away, it was “the worst night of sleep” she’s had at a hotel.

Anyone who stays in hotels regularly has probably faced the same issue: Noise.

External noise, internal noise, it doesn’t matter. After cleanliness, it’s the top concern of hotel guests, according to ProStay, a software and consulting firm that serves hotels.

And with an increased emphasis on quality sleep for health and wellness, hotel guests are more adamant than ever that a good night’s sleep is a key part of what they’re booking. Yet tackling noise issues is challenging in part because the sources vary — think traffic on a busy street in Manhattan versus yelling in a neighboring room. Plus, sound mitigation sometimes entails costly build-outs or renovations.

Here’s what’s at play — and what guests can do to protect their slumber.

It’s what a hotel is for, isn’t it?

While having a place to sleep has always been the primary solution guests are seeking from hotels, creating a calm, quiet environment hasn’t always been the predominant preoccupation of hoteliers, says Chekitan S. Dev, a professor at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration and a hospitality marketing and branding expert.

“It wasn’t made a priority in a significant way by hotels until the late 90s,” Dev told CNN Travel.

One manifestation of that shift is a Holiday Inn Express ad campaign that ran for more than a decade beginning in 1998 and showed ordinary people completing complex tasks such as brain surgery that were far outside their professional expertise. When asked if they were up to the job, they would explain it away by saying, “But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express hotel last night.”

But in many cases, hotels have invested more time and money in recent years in creating attractive lobbies, fine dining restaurants and exercise facilities.

Yet as hotel prices climb, so do guests’ expectations, and in the end, guests need to sleep.

“If you are charging me $400 a night for a hotel, I expect the room to be quiet,” Dev said.

Simon Chapman, general manager of The Benjamin in New York City, says today’s travelers are much more attentive to “the quality of their sleep.”

“They are no longer only asking whether a bed is comfortable; they are thinking about the complete environment — sound, light, room temperature, pillow support and how easily they can disconnect from technology,” he said in an email.

The value of eight hours of sound sleep has become more apparent to guests in an era of meditation apps and wearable fitness trackers that monitor sleep.

“The importance of sleep is becoming more front and center in everyday people’s lives for all of the work they have to do when they are in their regular living environment,” said John Lopos, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation. “And when they go out on the road, why should they sacrifice that?”

What hotels can control

There’s a lot that hotel owners can do to mitigate sound for all guests, particularly when they are building new properties.

Lopos says “if there’s new construction, they should absolutely be thinking about things like sound mitigation … in the design and construction phase, including the selection of materials, what are they doing to manage sound, light and climate?”

There are standards for sound transmission in modern building codes.

According to Glenn Nowak, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, a sound transmission class (STC) score of 50 is “the benchmark.”

Hotels whose rooms are built with that sound score would render a normal conversation taking place in one room “inaudible” in an adjacent room and “loud music would be quite faint.”

The problem?

“Many hotels around the world were built before such standards were put in place,” Nowak told CNN Travel.

And in newer properties, renovations sometimes inadvertently reduce a hotel’s sound rating.

Whether the property is old or new, the main obstacle is often a financial one. All of these considerations aimed at mitigating sound cost money.

“The tension is the investment required to create a good night’s sleep that is commensurate with the price point for the hotel room,” Dev of Cornell says. “Sometimes hotels don’t invest the amount that’s required.”

And the acoustical properties of materials vary widely. Nowak says when you’re dealing with sound mitigation, a “cast-in-place concrete wall” is often “significantly superior to a metal stud frame wall.”

But for the hotel, that translates into a bigger investment.

“The concrete wall takes longer to build, is less flexible, and has higher labor costs,” he said. “A concrete wall is a lot heavier than a metal stud wall, so this design decision would impact the entire building’s structural system.”

This is also true of building double walls, Nowak said, which are “among the more advanced strategies for … acoustically separating each room from the next,” but add to construction costs.

Beyond the physical construction of a hotel, which may or may not have been built to mitigate sound, travelers also typically contend with reservation systems that don’t really allow them to choose rooms in specific areas that could be quieter.

There are typically no schematics like airlines offer to allow travelers to choose their ideal situation — window or aisle, front or back. Unfortunately, you can’t see which hotel rooms are occupied or where they’re located.

Frequent travelers like GaNun say rooms on higher floors or at the end of hallways are quieter. But even if a guest anticipates the problem and tries to find a solution such as booking a corner room, it’s not easy to do without talking to someone on site.

Dev says it’s his pet peeve, and something he discusses often with hotel general managers and his students.

“You can see every seat available on the plane,” he says, referring to online flight booking. “Why can’t I do the same when I book a hotel?”

GaNun agrees. “Let me pick where I stay,” he said.

Dev says some chains are looking into this shift in reservations but balancing housekeeping needs with a variety of arrival and departure times isn’t simple.

There are also security concerns that keep hotels from displaying occupancy levels during the online reservation process.

Some hotels are marketing their quietest rooms to travelers who are looking for an especially restorative sleep experience. Under the “sleep tourism” umbrella, they often come paired with amenities such as a choice of pillows or weighted sleep masks. But it all comes at a premium the average traveler is unlikely to pay for a routine hotel stay.

Guests can, of course, call a hotel directly to ask for a quieter room at the end of a hall or far from the elevator, or put concerns over noise in the notes section of the online reservation system. Those requests can also be made at check-in, although the options narrow when occupancy is high.

What hotels can’t control

Exterior noise presents its own challenges.

In New Orleans, it could be sudden bursts of sound from passing musicians.

When Silvia Passiflora traveled to New Orleans, music coming from outside of her hotel room woke her up. A musician herself, Passiflora knows New Orleans is a hot spot for live music so it didn’t bother her that much. But the late-night revelry definitely penetrated the walls of her hotel.

“I kept waking up at 2, 3, 4 in the morning to music,” she said.

Sounds coming from the exterior often aren’t consistent, and hence they can be quite jarring for a traveler.

The Benjamin, for example, is located at Lexington Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from Rockefeller Plaza and other popular tourist attractions.

“No hotel — especially one in the heart of Manhattan — can eliminate every sound,” says Chapman, the general manager, adding, “City activity can be unpredictable.”

Many urban properties like The Benjamin have invested in multi-pane windows, and blackout curtains, which can block both light and sound. In lieu of bigger changes that could reduce noise complaints, many hotels now routinely hand out earplugs and eye masks.

And that’s helpful because some rooms — or areas of the hotel — are louder than others.

Maness, who spent the night clocking the hotel elevator’s comings and goings, said her room was on the first floor where sounds often reverberate. She learned a lot from her lousy night in Texas.

“I now request hotel rooms as far away from the elevator as possible and try to book rooms with no adjacent guests when possible,” Maness said.

Chapman, the GM of The Benjamin, encourages such a request, saying guests can indicate “higher floor, quieter location, or room away from the elevator,” and if availability allows, their requests will be accommodated.

Many large hotel chains also face another issue: they serve a wide swath of people with divergent needs, including business travelers gathering for a conference, couples on a romantic weekend getaway and families looking to entertain children. For this last group, what’s better than a hotel with a pool?

When Marie Cloutier stayed at a budget-friendly hotel in Massachusetts during a conference, the hotel pool was located in a ground-floor atrium at the center of the property where everyone could see — and hear — it. She assumed, incorrectly, that the fun would wind down at night.

“When I called the hotel manager, he said the kids needed their playtime and the rest of us could suck it up!” she said.

Of course, some of the reasons guests struggle to sleep while traveling have nothing to do with the thickness of the walls or noise from the hallway.

Lopos says especially with work travel, “You’re out of your routine, you’re socializing, it’s stressful.”

Hotel guests often have an ill-advised nightcap in the lobby bar. They eat heavily right before bedding down for the night. They stay out later than usual.

All of that affects sleep.

How to up your chances of a restful stay

Consumers are increasingly able to customize other products and services they buy. Could that one day mean an online reservation system that allows travelers to have greater control over the rooms they are assigned at hotels?

Maybe.

“The locus of control is shifting from the operator to the customer,” says Dev of Cornell.

But it may take time for hotels to catch up to guests who increasingly view a solid night’s sleep as the most important amenity a hotel can offer but aren’t prepared to pay an arm and a leg for an exclusive sleep suite.

In the meantime, hotel guests often have to find solutions on their own.

In addition to requests for quieter, less occupied parts of a hotel, you can consult websites, including The Quiet Hotels and another similarly named Quiet Hotels, that give hotels scores based on how quiet they are.

The Quiet Hotels, for example, gives ratings for hotels in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and many other cities. Hotels with scores of 90 or above are deemed “exceptionally quiet.” And the website explains its methodology. The editors evaluate the hotel’s surroundings for busy roads or nightlife and also assess the building’s construction, paying attention to sound transfer, window quality and room positioning.

So for its entry on The Lowell in Manhattan, for example, the site’s authors say the hotel is on a residential block of East 63rd Street with no through traffic, plus there’s a “low room count over fourteen quiet floors.” Meanwhile, an entry for Boston, Hotel Commonwealth, cites the building’s “concrete-and-steel post-2003 construction with high-acoustic glass.” Guests can also book rooms that face an interior courtyard. Note that none of the hotels listed are budget properties, but some are moderately priced.

Nowak, at UNLV, recommends older properties like The Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was built in 1910 with “massive load-bearing brick walls” and appears on the National Register of Historic Places.

General Manager Todd Wheeler says the “historic craftsmanship” that went into building the hotel helps make the property relaxing.

“Many guests appreciate the sense of quiet that comes from the building’s solid masonry construction,” he said.

Lopos encourages all travelers to embrace pro-sleep activities like getting a lot of natural light during the daytime, exercising and sticking to a consistent meal schedule. Closing the curtains tightly before bed and turning down the thermostat also help.

Lopos also travels with a white noise machine wherever he goes, and hotels are increasingly outfitting rooms with updated alarm clocks that have a variety of sound settings.

Hotel occupancy rates have been quite strong this year, with American properties reporting record levels, according to a report from CoStar and Tourism Economics.

It’s good news for the travel sector, but for those hotel guests plagued by loud elevators and rowdy fellow guests, it may just sound noisy.

So to be on the safe side, pack your earplugs.

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