The lights in hotels that can never be turned off are the late-night torture devices for many business travelers.

The lights that won't turn off and the sleepless nights. The anti - human lighting design in hotels has given many business travelers high blood pressure.

Business trips and travels are already tiring. When you return to your hotel room, you have to face a room full of lighting puzzles: You press all the switches, but more lights turn on. The spotlights that won't turn off at midnight are blindingly bright. In the end, you have to pull out the room card to cut off the power to all the electrical appliances.

On social media, complaints about hotel lighting have been overwhelming.

After a long and tiring journey to check into a hotel, thinking of getting some rest quickly, you find that the lights in the room are magically on. No matter how you tap, press, or even double - click the switches in some mysterious rhythm, they still stubbornly stay on, as if declaring war on you.

Finally, after turning off the lights and lying in bed, you are directly hit by the reading light like a "law - breaker", feeling like you are not staying in a hotel but being interrogated under torture.

For tired business travelers, this late - night battle with hotel lighting is more exhausting than overtime work and business trips.

Turning on the lights is like solving a mystery, and turning them off is like passing a level

A hotel room at night should be a haven for tired business travelers.

However, that light that never turns off turns it into a scene from a hotel "strange events record".

This light could be a spotlight by the bedside, a light strip in the corner, or even a lonely sensor light in the wardrobe.

Their common feature is that they are out of control and never give up.

You start performing a complete switch - pressing ballet in bed, rolling from the bedside to the door, feeling from the control panel to the wall, trying to find that mysterious off - switch.

"Reading, soft, romantic, bright"... After pressing all the ambiguous buttons on the panel, the lights are still as unromantic as a straight - laced man.

What's even more frustrating is that some hotel switches play the "guess the place name" game, offering you "London, Paris, New York" modes, and some even play the "traditional Chinese medicine massage" game.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Many business travelers have to conduct rounds of "trial - and - error experiments": press a button, look around, and then press the next one.

Going to sleep is like escaping from a secret room. You fumble around in the middle of the night when you need to go to the toilet and don't know how to turn on the toilet light.

The hotel lighting design is supposed to enhance the guests' experience, but now it has become one of the biggest "complaint points".

Image source: Xiaohongshu

In pursuit of the so - called atmosphere, many hotels have piled up all kinds of lighting fixtures - bathroom lights, bedside lights, corridor lights, wall lights, chandeliers, and mood lights.

The designer's original intention might have been to create a "dimming and color - adjusting" effect, but the reality is quite different.

When guests actually use them, they usually "perform a flurry of operations". When they turn off one light, another turns on. By the time they finally figure out the "secrets" of each switch and successfully turn off all the lights, it's already late at night.

What's even more confusing is that there are lights everywhere in the room, but there is often no bright main light.

After guests search for all the switches and turn on all the lights they can, they find that the whole room is still very dim.

After countless battles with hotel lighting, many business travelers have finally learned to make peace with the lights.

After all, is hotel lighting more difficult to deal with than the adjusted holidays?

The lights that should be bright are dim, and the lights that should be dim are bright

The core contradiction of hotel lighting is that the places that need bright lighting are dim, and there are uncontrollable light sources disturbing when you hope for complete darkness.

Dim lighting is one of the biggest complaint points. Most hotel rooms adopt a non - main - light design. The soft, diffused warm light source is intended to make guests feel at home and relieve travel fatigue. However, as the pace of life accelerates and the guests' demand for work increases, this design is obviously insufficient.

Business people complain that "when working at night on a business trip, looking at the computer under this kind of mood lighting will make your eyes go blind."

Women who need to do makeup are also suffering: "It seems that all hotel lights are dim. When it's cloudy, the whole room is even gloomier, making it inconvenient to do makeup."

What's even more maddening is that the lights that should be dim are not. Just when you finally get used to the darkness and are about to fall asleep, you find that there are always one or two bulbs that won't turn off.

These "law - breakers" are not under the control of any switch. Many people have to call the front desk and get "instructions as esoteric as martial arts secrets": double - click a certain button or press two of the eight buttons at the same time.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Ironically, the brightest area in a hotel room is often the bathroom, which affects sleep instead.

In many hotels, the wall or door connecting the bathroom and the guest room is made of glass, and there is no blackout curtain. When you use the bathroom at night, the whole room lights up, disturbing others in the room.

Why is the hotel lighting design so anti - human?

There is an unwritten rule in the hotel industry: the dimmer, the more high - class.

The essence lies in the principle of "rarity makes things precious". A hundred or two hundred years ago, electricity was scarce and lighting was a luxury. The brighter the place, the more luxurious it was. Later, as the cost of electricity decreased and electric lights became common in ordinary families, only civilian restaurants still used high - wattage incandescent lamps to show off their cleanliness, while high - end restaurants did the opposite.

So hotels have also learned this trick: use dim lighting to create the so - called high - class feeling.

There is a term in psychology called the "security cave effect". It explains that a dim environment can trigger the ancient genetic memory of humans. The sense of enclosure brought by the darkness is like a primitive man's cave, instantly suppressing the activity of the sympathetic nerve and naturally reducing blood pressure and pulse.

Black can also bring an ambiguous and lazy atmosphere. Coupled with the non - main - light design and the halo of mood lighting, it will reduce people's rational judgment.

Of course, if the lighting is too dim, it's not hard for consumers to complain that it's cost - cutting.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

The more high - end the hotel, the more it looks down on the "main light". Instead, it carefully divides the light sources into downlights, spotlights, and light strips, and then adds a ceiling to ensure that "you can see the light but not the lamp", which is considered excellent.

For example, the 2025 "Guest Room Design White Paper" of Marriott clearly states that dark gray should be the main color but account for ≤70%, and 30% warm colors should be used for decoration (such as camel - colored bedding and copper lamps) to avoid depression.

While the atmosphere and high - class feeling have become the hotel decoration standards, many business travelers are still struggling late at night to figure out how to tame the various lights in the room that "reply randomly".

Create "sleep - convincing power" with lights that understand people's hearts

In recent years, complaints about hotel switch design mainly focus on: too many, too scattered, too chaotic, and too difficult.

Many hotels have many lights and many switches, which are very scattered. If there is no master control, you have to run to every corner of the room to turn off the lights before going to sleep.

Some hotels even have a master control that can't really "control everything". Some lights need to be turned off separately or can't be turned off at all, which is all about blind guessing.

Some control panels themselves emit light, which is really unfriendly to "light - sensitive" people.

With the progress of technology and the upgrading of consumption, consumers' demand for technological, experiential, scene - based, and customized hotel products is becoming increasingly strong, and smart hotels are getting more and more attention.

However, due to the immature development of the industry, the mixed market, and the serious homogenization and uneven quality of products, there are many "pseudo" intelligent phenomena.

Many hotels have introduced intelligent lighting control systems, but the results are not satisfactory.

Among them, sensor lights are the main target of complaints. They are either not sensitive enough or too sensitive. Originally intended to improve guests' experience, they have instead become a burden on sleep. The hotels really mean well but do bad things.

Image source: Screenshot of @Li Ronghao's Weibo

The star Li Ronghao once complained about his hotel - staying experience, and the sensor lights were the biggest complaint point.

There was not even a switch to turn them off, and they were extremely sensitive. Even when he just turned over, the lights would turn on. When a car honked downstairs, all the lights would turn on. Helpless, he could only lie still in the quilt.

The intelligence of hotels cannot be achieved simply by stacking intelligent products and sticking a "smart hotel" label. It still requires more experience testing and continuous optimization.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

If guests in a hotel room don't want to turn on the lights at all but keep accidentally triggering the light sensors, this artificial intelligence has obviously become artificial stupidity.

When consumers keep complaining about hotel lighting, in essence, they are expressing their desire for more user - friendly design.

Hotel lighting design should serve people, not make people adapt to the lights.

Hotel lighting must change from looking smart to being truly practical, so that guests no longer toss and turn because of turning off the lights. Instead, they can embrace the darkness and enjoy a truly intelligent experience with just a sentence "I'm going to sleep".

Hotel accommodation doesn't need the icing on the cake of atmosphere. It needs to meet the guests' pursuit of an extremely comfortable accommodation experience.

For most people, simple, practical, and efficient product services are actually enough.

It is hoped that one day, hotel lighting can truly be bright enough when it should be and dim enough when it should be, so that every traveler can enjoy a truly dark and quiet sleeping environment after a long day of traveling.

After all, the best lighting design is to make you not feel the existence of the lights, rather than making you stay up all night thinking about how to turn them off.

This article is from the WeChat public account "Hotel Management Finance", author: Dacheng. Republished by 36Kr with authorization.