When you check into your hotel stay, you are expecting to start your vacation ― but it could also be where you start spreading germs and diseases.
That’s because hotels are full of high-touch surface areas that many people will regularly touch with a number of different unclean hands.
The problem is that you cannot trust your fellow travelers to practice good hand hygiene. “People just simply aren’t washing their hands properly in the first place, and then they’re washing them even less properly when they’re on vacation,” said microbiologist Jason Tetro aka “The Germ Guy,” citing fecal bacteria and Staphylococcus bacteria as two easily spreadable germs to watch out for.
“If you come into contact with any bacteria or virus, you pretty much have about a four-hour risk of getting exposed to it, if you happen to touch your face or put your fingers in your mouth,” Tetro explained.
And out of all the high-touch surfaces in a hotel, germ experts warn that elevator buttons for the first floor can be the biggest overlooked culprit.
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“Everybody touches the first floor [elevator button] to get out,” said Chuck Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. “I have to knuckle elevator buttons these days, because we’ve sampled enough of them.”
When Mary Spitzer was a researcher at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, she led a study where she evaluated viral spread and infection risks in a hotel lobby and found that first-floor elevator buttons were the most frequently touched fomite, or object that helps transmit infectious diseases.
As part of this, she sat in a lobby and noted what surfaces were being touched by what people and in what order. “Pretty consistently, it’d be hotel button first, obviously, because they’re coming down into the lobby,” Spitzer said.
People don’t typically touch an elevator button for long, but even a quick press has spread potential, because viruses can stay alive for hours or days. Tetro said that flu and COVID viruses could live on elevator button surfaces for four to eight hours, for example.
Once someone coughs and sneezes onto an elevator button, just you pressing that button “for that very short period of time is enough for you to pick up enough virus from that residue that’s been there,” Tetro said.
Beyond hotel elevators, Tetro warned that other high-touch surface areas in hotels like doorknobs, remote controls, light switches, alarm clocks, telephones, and ice buckets in particular can be full of germs “because they probably never get washed or disinfected.”
The good news is that one simple solution for hotels is to clean high-touch surface areas more purposefully. In Spitzer’s study, targeted cleaning on high-touch surface areas like refrigerator handles and credit card readers led to a significant reduction in viral load.
And you can always take matters into your own hands ― pun intended ― by practicing good health hygiene.
When in doubt, wash your hands or immediately use hand sanitizer when you are using a communal hotel space. “Touching things is sort of unavoidable” in hotels, Spitzer said. After you touch that elevator button, “be mindful of where you’re then putting your hands,” Spitzer suggested. “Are you touching your face? Are you touching your kid’s face? Are you eating things?”
This way, your vacation doesn’t end sooner than it has to because you got yourself sick.