Sean Moncrieff: Why are fancy hotel pillows such a pain in the neck?

We could have done the overpriced Airbnb thing: spent a week convincing ourselves that being ripped off was better than nothing. But instead, we deposited Daughter No 4 with her grandparents (she prefers them anyway) and went to stay in a couple of fancy hotels.

The fancy hotel poses some interesting philosophical/economic questions. If, say, the fancy hotel costs twice as much as the sort of hotel you might normally stay in, does that mean it’s twice as good? On paper (or computer screen) the fancy and regular hotels seem largely the same. You can use the pool or boil yourself at the spa or have your body pummelled while listening to pan pipe music. The websites display pictures of seemingly enormous rooms, which always feature an open bottle of wine. The restaurants always have a pretentious name, along with a spiel from the (usually male, usually bearded) head chef, who is possessed of a throbbing passion for fresh, locally sourced ingredients. (In fairness, both of the places we stayed in had excellent eateries, particularly the second, which had a gut-busting nine-course tasting menu.)

Most fancy hotels feature golf, to which I am indifferent. And in most fancy hotels, it’s notable how many staff members say hello to you; and with an almost believable level of enthusiasm. In the first place we stayed, they even knew my name. Every time I re-entered the building, there was an echoing wave of “Hello, Mr Moncrieff”. (I still find it odd when people refer to me as “Mister”. That’s my father.) Some of the foreign guests must have thought I owned the place. The Irish guests probably presumed I had notions.

Herself was able to identify that the bath products in the fancy hotels were undoubtedly superior, but we agreed that, once again, the pillows weren’t what we liked.

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Fancy or otherwise, hotel pillows are always disturbingly soft: they curl around the head like some sort of suffocating killer plant. You can’t trust them.

Neither of us likes a soft pillow, me particularly. At home, there’s a rock-hard one I use that, in an emergency armed-siege situation, I could tape to myself and use as body armour. I am occasionally tempted to bring it with me to hotels, but I don’t want people to think I have notions.

Pillow vulgarian

I’ve always assumed that the fault must lie with me; that I’m a pillow vulgarian. I’ve stayed in hotels where they have rhapsodised about the duck-down loveliness of their pillows. I’ve stayed in places with a pillow menu. They were all varying degrees of soft, though fresh and locally sourced.

Yet when I used the excellent fancy hotel broadband to google this issue, I discovered that I am not the softness-hating peasant I had assumed. All the Are You Using the Correct Pillow? websites seemed to agree that a soft pillow is only appropriate if you’re the kind of person who sleeps on their stomach. That’s toddlers catered for so. But for back or side sleepers, the pillow should be firm: it’s something to do with neck and spine alignment.

Hotels, apparently, go to a great deal of trouble to make sure that their pillows are clean and replaced on a regular basis. The pillows I’ve used in hotels are undoubtedly younger than the pillow I use at home, which is older than several of my children. But it’s a mystery why they are universally soft when the main thing you’d hope for in a hotel would be that you’d get a good night’s sleep in your enormous room without having to polish off that open bottle of wine.

There is a hack, though; a way around the insidious influence of Big Pillow. Experienced travellers, who sleep like grown-ups, will fill the pillowcase with towels to firm them up. But having to go to all that trouble, having paid all that money: pain in the neck either way.