You don’t know if you don’t ask. I have stayed at a large number of different types of accommodations and I have been surprised which are equipped for bedwetters. For example given their high number of guests, low rates and other factors, most hostels will have protected mattresses. Many B&Bs will similarly protect their mattresses given their narrow margins.
Asking not only provides the opportunity for the place you are staying to accommodate your needs, but it also lets you know of any possible risks. Some hotels will impose ‘cleaning fees’ for wet mattresses and the fine print concerning these fees is sometime buried deep on their websites, or posted somewhere in a foreign language. While wetting the bed while staying in a hotel may be embarrassing, being charged for doing so is even worse. And yes, I have been charged once for wetting the bed, but this is a story for another post (link for future post).
Worse still, if you are like me and many of your hotel costs are charged to your employers, it means the possibility of lots of awkward and embarrassing questions from your employer if they happen to receive the bill for your bed wetting mishap.
Asking in advance helps avoid this, you may be pleasantly surprised and have all your needs met, or you might learn about a punitive cleaning fee, and take extra precautions to avoid the cost and embarrassment. Either way you are covered.
While asking in advance is important is can be difficult. There are several factors which can make it more difficult:
- The first is of course embarrassment, asking someone to accommodate your needs means that another human will know about an embarrassing problem which we generally keep private. While there are efforts to de-stigmatize bedwetting and incontinence, thank you people at Depends for their Underwareness Campaign, bedwetting as an adult is still something that we don’t go blabbing about to strangers.
- It can be hard to get in contact with the correct person to ask. The person at check in may not know what goes on in housekeeping, and as such they may give you an incorrect answer, or involve even more people in responding to your embarrassing query.
- You may not speak the language of the place you are staying, making communicating your needs. This may be based on an existing language barrier, but also cultural differences.
There are things you can do to avoid or overcome these challenges. First asking can be hard, but the modern world has produced tones of amazing technology which significantly reduces our need to communicate face to face. I will leave it up to sociologists to discuss whether this is a good or bad thing, but it certainly makes talking to strangers about your bedwetting problem easier.
To address the problem presented by language barriers, I am working on a post which will provide translations of a simple request for a waterproof mattress cover into different languages (link to future post).
The E-mail
If possible, contact the place you are staying in advance with an e-mail. You may need to rout around on their website (assuming that they have one), or simply e-mail the front desk or housekeeping with your inquiry. Keep it short and to the point, and make sure it contains all the necessary information that they will need to reply, so you don’t have to go back and forth. E-mail is actually even better than making say a phone call, as it is less prone to misunderstanding or your making mistakes out or nerves.
So keep the e-mail message short but with necessary information:
A typical e-mail message I send reads as follows:
Hello there, I have just booked a room (Confirmation Number ########) under my name for the Dates (#####). Regarding this booking, I would like to request that the bed be equipped with a waterproof mattress cover. Please let me know if this is possible.
Make sure you add the final sentence, as you are not looking to send an open ended request, you want a reply to confirm either way. Otherwise you have no way of knowing if they are able to accommodate your request. This is very basic, but be sure to give your e-mail an innocuous topic, as something like ‘Bed Wetting Guest Request’ has the potential to embarrassingly pop up in your inbox (and you don’t want them to think Dr. Seuss is staying). For added privacy, consider using your personal e-mail account, as if you use a work account those e-mails can possibly be read by other employees at your work.
The Phone Call
E-mail is not always an option and housekeeping (or hotels in general) aren’t usually very good at replying to these types of messages. As a result you may need to make the dreaded phone call. These are a little more awkward, and usually involve getting passed around between various people at the hotel. Unless a number for housekeeping is posted directly on the hotel website, you can call the front desk and ask to be put in touch with housekeeping. They will usually ask why (as you are calling from an outside number), and you may need to explain the situation your needs. If you are talking to the front desk and looking to be transferred, keep this as straight forward as possible.
If you are nervous practice what you are going to say, or have it written out in front of you. The first few times I had to call a hotel with a request of this nature when I was much younger, I got horribly flustered and on at least one occasion rang off without actually getting my request out.
You may have to have offer more of an explanation to housekeeping. If it helps, try speaking in the third person or using indirect pronouns, you would be surprised how much this helps. Consider the following two different phone scripts:
“Hello, housekeeping? I am calling with regards to my upcoming stay at your hotel. I wet the bed, and was wondering whether you had a waterproof mattress cover for your beds?”
“Hello, housekeeping? I am calling with an upcoming booking, one of the guests is concerned about bedwetting, and I was calling to inquire as to whether your hotel had waterproof mattress covers?”
The second version gets the same outcome without directing attention to you as a bedwetter, and forcing you to make a personal admission to a stranger, an admission that you may have only made to a small number of people in your life. The housekeeping staff have no way of knowing that you wet the bed, for all they know you are calling because you have a small child who wets the bed.
A word of warning, on at least one occasion I have used the second version of the script over the phone and found a cot with a waterproof mattress cover had been added to my room, which required an additional call to housekeeping to clarify. So there are drawbacks to this method.
You can avoid all this by simply asking for what you need without citing the reason for the need:
“Hello, housekeeping? I am calling to request that a waterproof mattress cover be placed on the bed my room for the following booking.”
Housekeeping does not need to know why you are asking. While bedwetting might come to mind as the most obvious reason in our heads, there is a load of other reasons why someone might want to equip their bed in such a way. Companies selling mattress covers, such as Protect-A-Bed, provide a number of reasons why someone might buy their products. Protect-A-Bed argues that ” Every mattress needs protection from allergens, dust mites, liquids and stains that can be detrimental to both your health and the life of your mattress.” Allergies to dust and concerns over dust mite or bedbugs are totally valid reasons for requesting a mattress cover. You are, after all, sleeping on a bed which is slept on by hundreds of different people every year.
Other possible reasons are concern over spilling food and drink in the bed and being charged for stains, after all, who hasn’t had a small feast in their hotel bed at one time or another. Another reason is that you could be menstruating and concerned about stains.
Given that there are a number of reasons for requesting a mattress cover, there is no need for you to provide a reason behind your request.
In Person
The third, and in my opinion the least optimal of these three contact options is to ask someone in person. This is of course the most embarrassing, as unlike the other options, the person to whom you are making the request can associate your face with the request and the embarrassment associated with it. Again, you can deflect this by making the request in the third person, but here again it is more difficult, as if you are checking in, you are clearly not checking in with a younger child. And not all of us are as good at playacting in person, an embarrassed look is a sure give away that the cover is for you. Those of you who have purchased adult diapers in person will know what I am talking about here, your body language when you buy them tells the cashier whether they are for you, or an elderly family member.
I usually try to avoid asking in person whenever possible. In fact I will often check in, go to my room and see if there happens to be a mattress cover already in place (as sometimes this is the case) thereby eliminating my need to talk to anyone. If there isn’t a mattress cover in place, I will call the front desk or housekeeping from my room, eliminating the need for a face to face interaction.
Circumstance may force you to make the request in person. Perhaps you are staying at a very small hotel with no e-mail and no phones in their rooms. Maybe you are staying in a country where you don’t speak the language well enough to communicate over the phone (as communicating in a foreign language can be easier in person). If you need to ask in person you can may be forced to do so to the person at the front desk, which can be difficult as there are other people around who could overhear, adding to embarrassment.
To avoid this, I have, on occasion, flagged down a member of housekeeping cleaning on my floor, and asked them on person. Again this is embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as being charged for a wet mattress.
One time, because I was staying on the same floor as colleagues, was worried they might hear my request through the wall, and had no opportunity to put in a request in advance or at check in, I wrote a very clear note and handed it to the person at the front desk when I went out to dinner. They were a little surprised but it saved me a lot of potential embarrassment.
The Bedwetting Traveller 