We’ve all been there.  On business travel at a Hotel, you’re thirsty but you don’t want to spend the $4.00 on that small bottled water.

So you reach for that crystal glass. But not so fast. You might be shocked to learn about the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of the drinking glasses found in your Hotel room.

Years ago, a friend of mine – a flight attendant for Singapore Airlines and world traveller extraordinaire – informed me that most Hotels go no further than wiping down the glasses with the same rag that they clean the rest of the room with. 

Surely she must have been exaggerating.  Right?

The thought of it haunted me for years.

So, I finally mustered up the courage (and the stomach) to dig around and ask the question myself.

Turns out, an on-camera investigation last year by ABC 7 in the San Francisco Bay Area confirmed it.  Camera crews caught Housekeeping staff at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel in San Mateo simply “toweling off” dirty glasses and replacing the paper lids over them.

Good Morning America performed a similar undercover investigation last year which revealed that Housekeeping staff at an Embassy Suites in Phoenix simply rinsed the glasses in the bathroom sink and dried them with a towel before replacing them for guests.  And, at the Millenium Hotel in Cincinnati, housekeeping was caught on tape spraying dirty glasses with a spray bottle, which turned out to be Mildew remover.  On the bottle, it clearly says “harmful if swallowed.”

By law, glasses are required to be processed through a dishwasher or by a manual disinfection process. (And no, rinsing the glass in the bathroom sink doesn’t count.)  The good news (we hope) is that most major Hotels claim to have policies which now include strict requirements to remove the glasses completely from the room and to send glasses through the dishwasher. This includes Hotels such as the W Hotels, The Marriott, Four Seasons and others.

My motto in Hotel glasses, as in life, is to Trust but Verify.  I now swear by this rule: if you pick up a glass and it shows traces of lint, there is a good chance it has only been wiped down by a Housekeeping rag.  If it is entirely clean and free of lint or other spots, then there is a decent likelihood that it has actually been run through a dishwasher.

Hmmm. Maybe the Holiday Inn had it right all these years. Plastic cups, wrapped in sanitary paper, untouched by the human hand.  Maybe some things in life are better when you live the simple life.

Or, maybe it’s worth it to pay the extra $4.00 for the bottled water after all.