I Slept There So You Don't Have To: What Bad Hotels Teach Us About Empathy in Tech

As a somewhat frequent traveler, I’ve had the pleasure of staying at some wonderful hotels as well as some, well, not so much. As someone who does not require a lot of sleep, it takes an extra bad hotel experience to stand out.

Imagine this recent one, which had numerous issues including these:

• Bathroom with motion sensor-triggered lights. And these are not soft night lights, these are fluorescent interrogation spotlights. Generally not great for trying to return to slumberland.
• The empty mini-fridge makes sounds at 2 a.m. which can best be described as “angry typing on a click clacky keyboard.”
• The shower cannot be turned on without being in the shower. Sometimes an icy cold shower is great, but it’s best on my own terms. I've seen innovative ways that hotels solve for this even in very small spaces.

So, instead of sleeping, I had various thoughts along these lines:

• “Did whoever designed this room ever actually sleep in here?”
• “Did they ever sleep in any hotel?”
• "Do the survey metrics that roll up to some corporate headquarters thousands of miles away from this hotel reflect in future hotels being better for sleeping?"
• “Are they a really good, super sound, world champion sleeper, so these things don’t matter?”
• “Did they have a OKR/KPI for how many light switches they could add to the room with a bonus for any that don’t actually do anything?”

Why am I talking about this?

Are you sleeping in the room? The punchline for all of us who build algorithms, software, data pipelines, or any other solution.

Go and See for Yourself:
It’s super important to go observe firsthand to make informed decisions. Follow the manufacturing flow, talk with the users, really look at the data, etc. Do many rooms have the mini fridge unplugged for some reason?

“Mystery Shop” the Work:
Can you do the task in the app without some unusual permission or information not in the documentation? Did you open the shipping box as if you were the recipient? Did you get a horrible night sleep? Above and beyond normal QA. Have true, deep empathy for the user and their situation by actually being the user to the maximum extent possible.

Understand the Goal:
Business hotels are generally in the business of sleep, not light switch maximization. Your ML model is in the business of predicting something, not mathematical coolness. What matters for the core outcome? Anything else can typically be removed.

Checkout Thoughts

The more the work we do has deep empathy for what we’re trying to do, the better. When we can establish deep empathy, at that point we’re essentially scratching our own itch when we’re solving for the business goals.

Empathy isn’t a feel‑good, it’s quality control in disguise. When we regularly “live” in the products and processes we create, the rough edges scrape us first, giving us the chance to sand them down before they ever reach a customer.

By insisting on that firsthand experience wherever possible (sleeping in the room, clicking through the app, walking the process) we convert surprises into deliberate choice and transform inconvenience into excellence.

The result is a solution that feels inevitable and natural to users because we absorbed the friction. We slept in the room and fixed it.

Sweet dreams.