The new ‘hotel stripping’ trend dividing opinion – so how clean do you leave your room?

COVID has made most of us more conscious of germs while out and about, but some travellers are taking tidying to the extreme.

A new breed of conscientious holidaymakers are strapping on an apron and playing maid while staying in hotels.

Last week, Darren Dowling posted an image to Facebook showing his hotel room etiquette, and it went viral, with members of the public labelling the behaviour extreme.

The photo showed his habit of stripping the sheets from his bed and neatly folding each piece on the mattress before check out. But it turns out, Dowling isn’t alone.

Stephanie Thompson, 50, who lives in Cincinnati, has a check-out cleaning routine that she splits with her husband Jon, to lessen the strain on a hotel’s cleaning staff.

For the past decade, at the end of their travels, Jon arranges the suitcases and checks all the drawers to see if the couple left anything behind.

As that happens, Stephanie strips the bed of its sheets, gathers all the used and unused towels and puts them in the bathtub, and condenses all the trash into one bag and knots it shut.

During their stay, the couple refuses daily housekeeping visits and they leave a $25 (£18) tip at the end with a thank you note.

Stephanie told The Post “I leave a hand-written note that says, ‘Thank you so much! Have a wonderful day, blessings.’ We’ve been doing it so long, it’s routine.”

She added: “I don’t even know if these people make enough money to even go on a vacation — so their daily life is cleaning up after privileged people.