Colombo Court Blog The Hotel
Housekeeping Week: the people behind every room
Every September we stop for a week to celebrate the team who make the beds, fold the towels and notice the details. Competitions, swans, and a lot of laughter.
A good room is one you do not think about. The bed is made, the towels are where your hand expects them, the surfaces are clean, and nothing about it distracts you from the reason you came. That takes a team who care about details nobody will ever mention, and once a year we make a point of mentioning them.
International Housekeeping Week
It falls in September every year, and hotels around the world use it to thank the people whose work is invisible when it is done well. At Colombo Court that means a week of competitions, a prize-giving, and the rest of the hotel, from the front office to the kitchen, turning out to applaud.
The competitions
The perfect bed. Timed, judged on precision, and taken very seriously. A hotel bed is harder to make well than it looks, and the winners can do it in under three minutes.
Towel art. Swans, bears, hearts and flowers folded from nothing but towels, arranged on the bed with rose petals. The creativity in this round surprises us every year.
The room relay. A team race through the tasks of turning a room around, from stripping the bed to folding the last towel, which is how the day actually goes, only louder.
Why it matters
Behind every clean room there is a person who takes pride in their craft, and in a hotel of thirty-one rooms that pride is what guests feel without knowing why. We are grateful for it, and once a year we say so out loud, with certificates, a lunch and a great deal of noise. To our housekeeping team: thank you.
If you would like to meet the result of their work, the rooms are here.
