Some years ago I stayed in a hotel outside London, and they apparently had a policy of saving as much as possible on soap bars.. so they used some horrible high-pH soap, very cheap looking. But it was nearly impossible to rinse it off.. took me fifteen minutes of hot water usage after I was, or should have been done with the shower. Whatever they saved in soap they lost many times over in water and even more in energy use.

And in a tourist place on an island farther south the room had an information binder which also asked that you shouldn't waste water as there weren't many natural resources for water there. However, the hot water came from the far end of the narrow, rectangular-shaped long hotel, and the pipes were outside and weren't insulated, they were completely bare. Whenever you turned off the hot water for a few minutes it would take some five minutes to get it back, water running, as the pipes got cold right away (there are many other usages for hot water than just using the shower - the rooms had kitchens). So of course all the guests used many times more water than they would have needed, not to mention the wasted heat. Totally baffling.

Also they probably save on cleaning costs.

I first thought this is nonsense, but then it made a lot sense. It might be an exception to the rule "never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity."

The bathroom needs to be destined properly.

My shower in Denmark has no door, and no curtain, but the splashes don't reach very far away, and aren't in the way of anywhere I'd want to walk after showering anyway.

I've often seen hotel bathrooms in other countries that get this wrong. In the worst case, splashed water from the open shower runs all across the bathroom, and in one case (a Grand Hyatt!) into the main room carpet.

Did the designers not know water flows down?

The half pane of glass is appropriate in warm parts of the world where you want the heat to be removed as quickly as possible. I suspect some hotel executive thought it looked cool in Miami, then made it the standard for the whole chain.

i hate it when the set up the half-pane in such a way that you can't adjust the water temp/pressure without being directly under the shower head.

when dealing with a new set of shower controls, i like to stand to the side and figure out what's happening and whether i need to let it warm up rather than stepping into the firing lane and taking whatever it throws at me

Europeans are good at building a lot of things, but I will never understand the "cosplay a small flood" style bathrooms.

It's just... inefficient? Why wouldn't we want to catch the water closest to where it comes out?

The drain should be within the shower area, with all the bathroom floor draining that way.

If it's in the centre of the room it's been done very badly. I've never seen this in Denmark, even in some very old apartment buildings.

> Denmark loves their 'wet' bathrooms in hotels, no shower door and a drain in the center of the room.

If you're renting an apartment in Shanghai, a cheap one will have a door to the bathroom, but the shower won't be a separate fixture. The entire bathroom functions as the shower (the hose or fixed piping is mounted on a wall), and there's a drain in the floor.

A more recent apartment will have a shower installation that is, say, separate from the toilet.

That's an overly broad generalization. Shower curtains are pretty common in Norway, and I've found them in hotels all over Europe and even one in Japan.