Before you finish your shower at the Four Seasons–run Naviva in Mexico, make sure to look up: You’ll see the forest canopy swaying above a well-placed skylight. Meanwhile, the bathtub is positioned by a window to give you a view while you soak. The bathroom is as beautiful as it is functional—and that’s exactly the point. Bathrooms, once a tucked-away afterthought in all but the splashiest hotel rooms, have now become a major focus of the floor plan, a place of innovation and contention in equal measure.
You already know that breakfast reveals how a hotel runs (because we told you). Bathrooms offer another yardstick—particularly the bathtub, or lack thereof. More expensive to build, clean, and maintain than a shower, the bathtub has morphed into a signifier of luxury. Its presence or absence suggests the trade-off between space, labor, and engineering, which defines the gulf between a mid-market hotel and a luxury property.
How luxury hotels are embracing the bathtub
Five-star hotels that associate bathrooms with luxury will earmark 25 to 28 percent of their floor plans for them, while a mid-market rival will allocate 20 percent for bathrooms, according to Michael Suomi, whose Suomi Design Works has worked on numerous high-end hotels. At the St. Regis Bermuda Resort, room configurations apportion an extraordinary 41 percent of the total square footage to bathrooms, while half of the square footage of each room at Costa Rica’s Nayara Springs is for indoor-outdoor bathing.
Many intentional gestures in some of the world’s fancier hotels focus on the tub. Take Cheetah Plains in South Africa, with basins overlooking a grazing area for elephants that meander so close, it seems almost possible for bathers to touch them; its dual vanities have dual shaving mirrors, a thoughtful nod to couples who want to do their morning routine at the same time. Wellness hideaway Eriro in the Austrian Alps has wooden, canoe-like bathtubs instead of classic porcelain, which sit like sculptures in the middle of the bedroom. Open the door of your suite at the St. Regis in Bermuda, and what greets you is a giant tub, invitingly positioned in a prime spot at its center.
Meanwhile, the so-called atelier rooms at the former Nomad hotel in New York (rebranded as the Ned Nomad as of 2022) included vintage clawfoot tubs positioned beside a desk, in front of a window, and facing the TV. “Someone in bed could be talking to someone in the tub, and you could put your cocktail down on the desk,” explains Suomi, whose firm handled those interiors. Menizei, an adults-only glamping resort in Washington State, even has a private bathhouse for each of its three tents, including a Finnleo cedar sauna, for an experience it calls “forest cocooning.”
The bathroom experience at Cheetah Plains in South Africa might include wildlife sightings.
Courtesy of Cheetah Plains
If most travelers prefer showers, why do luxury hotels keep the tub?
Showers are now the overwhelming preference for people in most countries. A 2016 study by the London-based market research company Kantar Group suggested that 90 percent of Americans preferred showering, as did people in many other major countries—99 percent of Brazilians, for example, and 92 percent of Germans. And since bathtubs are an expensive inclusion at every stage of hotel design and operation, it’s easy to understand why operators have increasingly stripped them out.
“They’re heavy and cumbersome, slow to clean, and when a bathtub fills with water, it weighs a lot,” says Stephani Robson, a longtime professor at Cornell University’s hospitality school. Engineering a building to handle rooms with baths requires more robust structures, which in turn can reduce the number of floors architects can squeeze into a height allowance in a new build, she says.
“Tubs are expensive to ship and install, and they can crack in the process. Then there’s the maintenance of all the caulking around it,” agrees hospitality consultant Bjorn Hanson, who’s taught at New York University. Opting for a bathtub forces designers to allocate a larger percentage of the floor plan to the wet area, again reducing the key count of the overall hotel—fine for a high-touch, high-end resort, but anathema to a value-driven city-center crash pad. Don’t forget, too, that bathtubs take more time for attendants to clean, making them an unhelpful time suck.
Brands began removing bathtubs from standard designs in the mid-2010s, Hanson explains (call it the Great Bath Extinction), but it was the COVID-19 pandemic that was the true pivot. Many hotels opted to undertake long-needed renovations while occupancy was low, and most updates removed that standard bath; midscale properties aimed at traveling families usually retained a few rooms with tubs to cater to anyone with small children.
Each guest room at Menizei in Washingon State’s Olympic National Park has its own floating bathhouse.
Courtesy of Menizei
Are showers really more sustainable than baths?
One thing that experts say isn’t a driving factor behind the shift: sustainability. “The common perception that showers are inherently less wasteful than baths does not always hold true—particularly in the absence of flow regulation,” says Pauline Van Beneden, who runs sustainable hospitality consultants Ecotel Consultancy and works on sustainable issues in the sector. “A typical full bath uses 150 to 200 liters [33 to 44 gallons] of water, depending on tub size and fill level. A standard shower, at an average flow rate of 9 to 12 liters [2 to 2.6 gallons] per minute, can quickly exceed that if it lasts longer than 12 to 15 minutes.” Flow restrictors and aerated showerheads can address that issue, she says. “Neither baths nor showers are intrinsically wasteful.”
Nayara Springs owner Leo Ghitis is adding eight new spa villas over the next 18 months in response to guest feedback. Each will have an oversize plunge pool, a Jacuzzi, a reflexology area, a dry sauna, a cold plunge, and a treatment room. “People said we were crazy when we devoted almost 50 percent of the space to the bathroom, but people love it,” he says. “Each of these rooms will be a mini spa, with 60 to 70 percent of the 2,000 square feet for everything to do with bathing.”
Hotel bathrooms have long reflected changing habits
The Great Bath Extinction isn’t the first time that hotel bathrooms have revealed changing habits, adds Hanson; consider the addition of raised-edge vanities in the 1980s, as the gender of business travelers became more mixed, and complaints about bottles rolling off the sink became more commonplace. Bidets became a fad stateside for similar signaling reasons in that era. “They thought it would say we are really attentive to women travelers, and even the people who don’t use one, they will detect it’s high end. But many American travelers didn’t know how to use it, or quite what it was for,” he laughs.
Now, bidets are included only when the core guest is from a culture where they’re fixtures—the Middle East, for example. The move to full-size toiletries rather than single-use plastic miniatures isn’t always optional, either, Hanson continues: Some municipalities mandate using them. While eco-minded operators may welcome the shift, bulk dispensers are not universal. “They’re significantly cheaper, because they don’t have to be dealt with every day,” he explains, noting that bulk dispensers also reduce the time room attendants spend refilling toiletries.
One thing that remains standard: a toilet cistern that’s at least slightly private, whether behind a little wing wall or in a water closet. When hotels do try to innovate in that area, missteps can quickly follow, warns designer Lauren Gerchakov at Lang & Schwander. She was called in to redesign a lifestyle hotel room’s bathroom after guests complained that the frosted glass door on the WC, coupled with a trendy, barn-door–style closure to the bathroom, was all form and no function. “Designers love them because they save space on the door swing, but the bathroom door needs to be fully closeable, and barn doors leave gaps,” she says. “Guests complained about the sound and the smell.” She swapped out the glass for standard wood and changed the hardware so the barn door closed firmly.
The bathrooms at Eriro in Austria have pine floors with untreated wood and bathtubs made from carved pine.
Photos by Alex Moling
What the smallest bathroom details reveal about a hotel
Even the smallest bathroom details can say a lot. Greg Swan, a Minneapolis-based marketing consultant and frequent business traveler, has spent years paying attention to one of the most easily overlooked details: the toilet paper fold. Swan doesn’t think there’s causation between a hotel’s overall performance and its toilet paper origami, but he does see correlation. “The care and attention spent on a detail like a toilet paper fold has translated to the care and attention you receive at checkout or from room service,” he says. “They’re usually different staff at the hotel, yet they all report up to the same management.”
A near-constant work travel schedule puts Swan in a different hotel room every other week, and over 17 years, he’s documented close to 200 examples on his blog, A Perfect Triangle. He takes photographs of the rolls when he checks in, rating them for precision, paper quality, and aesthetic excellence. Swan gives kudos to Omni Hotels for its hospital-corner style crispness and to W Hotels for its branded stickers, but the half-torn sheet at Hilton Vacation Club’s Polo Towers in Las Vegas earned a 0/10 score instead of a jackpot.
“The perfect diamond fold at the Hotel Villagio in Napa Valley, in a marble restroom that was so white and plush? It was the gold standard of toilet paper folding,” he says, noting that his own attempts to replicate such precision have fallen flat. With the bathtub now firmly established as a luxury marker, could the next bathroom battleground be fought over such small toilet touches? The roll may change, but the roles these details play stay the same.
