crisp white bedding, fluffy pillows, sleek curtains, a faint smell of bleach from the bathroom. Do you miss hotel rooms? I do. But something disturbing has happened since the last time most of us took vacations. It's getting harder to clean rooms because of COVID protocols.

11th of February, between the 7.5 of the morning.

That's Christina Velasquez. She's worked as a hotel housekeeper for the last 21 years,

and we had her record audio diaries of what she's seeing right now.

At the 9 of the morning, I'm going to do, 14, a quarter that had, like, 4, 5, 10 of this diaries of what she's seeing right now.

Christina has seen and cleaned all sorts of rooms.

But she says that ever since the pandemic started, her work is harder and dirtier than ever.

I'm Gustavo Ariano.

You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times.

It's Tuesday, March 15, 2022.

LA Times business reporter Hugo Martine covers the travel industry, and he's been tracking how the pandemic has impacted hotels, especially the people in charge of cleaning rooms.

Hugo, welcome to the Times.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

When COVID-19 came into the world two years ago, one of the hardest hit sectors was the travel industry.

It just flat out crashed, especially the hotel sector.

How is it going for hotels right now?

It's not quite back to capacity.

It's fluctuating.

Like during the Super Bowl, we got back to capacity, and during spring break and times like that, we reach pre-pandemic capacities but overall we're still below i'd say somewhere around the 70s percent compared to pre-pandemic

so that's the room capacity how about staffing for these hotels yeah staffing is still not up to

100 percent basically most hotels just laid off or furloughed almost all of their

staff when the pandemic hit. And they've been slow to get them back up. Some of the workers just don't

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