We did our annual Christmas road trip home to Indiana for Christmas and stayed at the Fairfield Inn in Wytheville Virginia Saturday night. I got up at 5:20am and did an interval treadmill workout followed by some Rubberbanditz. Hotels, please provide cleaning wipes for your fitness centers. Pretty please?
Looking at the two makeup remover towelettes made me think of an article a business traveler sent me this week about hotels marketing to women. I can’t help but think that men are behind it in determining what woman want. For example:
- Makeup remover wipes in the bathroom – This is positive only if said wipe isn’t filled with fragrance and a bunch of crap you shouldn’t put on your face. The makeup remover wipe at the Fairfield had so many irritants in it I used it to wipe off my water bottle and that was about as far as I would go.
- Earring backs – Seriously?
- Copies of Vogue, InStyle and Women’s Health – Neutral. I rarely read any magazine in a hotel and don’t subscribe to any myself but I would thumb through these. Women’s Health might accidentally fall in my bag to take with me, however I would also read Men’s Health. If a hotel had Wired? No question. That mag would be in my bag in a heartbeat.
- High-quality hairdryer, straightening iron and decent quality hair care products – Positive but should not be gender-specific. A man that cares about his hair is not girly.
- Low-Calorie Menu items – Positive that they are offering low-cal options. HUGE fail that they are marketing it to women. Are you freakin’ kidding me? That is an insult for both genders. Are women the only ones out there watching their nutrition intake? And if they are, they shouldn’t be because there are just as many moobies as muffin-tops. Men may feel embarrassed to order one of these selections if they think it is feminine. Half my clients are men and all of them think about their nutrition. That idea blows. It reminds me of a business meeting I was at where they served Powerbars and Luna bars in the afternoon. Because, you know, we are all workin’ up a sweat and burnin’ calories sitting in a conference room all day and the giant lunch we just had two hours ago wasn’t enough….I digress. There was a guy that picked up a Luna Bar, read that it was for ‘women’ and promptly put it back and picked up the PowerBar. That Luna Bar would have saved him 60 calories. The only thing different about the Luna Bar was that it had fewer calories, which is what he should have been eating too. I told him he wouldn’t grow a vagina after he ate it but he still felt self-conscious and stuck with the PowerBar.
Kudos to hotels for trying but dekudos for making them gender-specific. As Josephine Fairley says..an extra set of earbuds in a room would make a real difference! Let's go back to the drawing board.
