Why do new hotel bathrooms have so little privacy?
Hotels are replacing traditional bathroom enclosures with transparent glass walls, gapped barn doors, and rimless half-showers. This exposes guests to unwanted sights, sounds, and smells, even forcing non-romantic roommates to leave the room entirely just so the other can shower. These open layouts also wake sleeping partners with nighttime light and inevitably flood the floor because the showers lack edges to hold in the water.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
Why do new hotel bathrooms have so little privacy?
- 1Leaving the hotel room entirely every time the other person needs to shower or use the bathroom.Did this help you?
- 2Using crowdsourced websites like bringbackdoors.com to check for proper doors and boycott hotels with open bathroom designs.Did this help you?
- 3Paying more to upgrade to expensive suites that still feature traditional, independent bathrooms with regular locking doors.Did this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“NO ONE wants a transparent/frosted bathroom window so my partner sees me using the bathroom. I also don't want to be woken up by the light from the bathroom when my partner uses the bathroom at night. Or a barn door with a massive gap in the door so they hear and smell everything.”source ↗
“I stayed in a hotel that didn’t have a proper shower door. The design relies on your body blocking the water. My 10 year old absolutely flooded the bathroom because they weren’t tall enough to block the water. The bathroom that had a barn door and giant window to the bedroom.”source ↗
“why so many hotel showers with no raised edges to hold in the water? I've been at a bunch of newer places with no rims around the shower floors and the end result is inevitably a completely wet bathroom floor.”source ↗
“we stayed at this place once for Oktoberfest and had a male and female non romantic room pairing that had to leave the room every time the other one wanted to shower.”source ↗
“Stayed at a Hilton all inclusive in Cancun with glass bathroom walls, including a glass door on the bathroom that I managed to just walk right into, and a shower like how you described.”source ↗
Where this came up
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