Listen Up, Hotels: Stop Gaslighting Me Into Hoping There’s a Bathtub in My Room

A “rainfall shower” is a supremely different experience than a “soaking tub.” I’m planning a (potentially fantastical) vacation here, I need to know just how relaxed I’m going to be able to be!

By Nora Biette-Timmons | June 11, 2025 | 12:01pm

Photo: Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images Travel

Listen Up, Hotels: Stop Gaslighting Me Into Hoping There’s a Bathtub in My Room

Once upon a time, we had procrastination websites galore. There were the educational (Sporcle); the random in a PG way (StumbleUpon); the random-but-potentially-X-rated (ChatRoulette); the crowd-sourced blogs (FMyLife, Damn You Autocorrect); your friends’ blogs (Xanga, LiveJournal, WordPress); your friends’ micro-blogs (Twitter was a phenomenal procrastination tool until a few years ago); your friends’ Facebook profiles (or more accurately, your friends’ exes’ new hook-ups Facebook profiles) … et cetera. My college years coincided with a veritable smorgasbord of procrastination opportunities just waiting to be clicked on. What do the college kids of 2025 do to put off entering their essay prompts into ChatGPT besides watch TikToks that are slowly pushing them right??

For so long, I—much like my Zoomer brethren and every other poor idiot that encounters the internet these days—had run out of procrastination websites. But due to some combination of being in my 30s and developing a decent nest egg of travel credit card points every year, I’ve recently pivoted to a new procrastination tactic: researching and devouring content about beautiful boutique hotels around the world. Sometimes I might actually be planning a long weekend in a chic city; sometimes I’m simply daydreaming; sometimes I’m chaotically toggling back and forth between a booking calendar and my bank account to determine whether, if I really stretch, I could make it work.

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But regardless of how “realistic” or necessary my hotel perusal is, the relaxing, brain-smoothing benefits of it are immediately negated when I see a bullet point in a description say that a room has a “rainfall shower or a soaking tub” (emphasis mine). Which is it, mister??? A “rainfall shower” is a supremely different experience than a “soaking tub.” I’m planning a (potentially fantastical, but that’s immaterial) vacation here, I need to know just how relaxed I’m going to be able to be!!

Look, this is no shade to the rainfall shower heads out there. Just last month, I had a couple very pleasant showers courtesy of the Hotel Willa in Taos, New Mexico (not sponsored but I would accept a free stay in the future). The shower itself was spacious, the water pressure was excellent, there was no little nozzle in the showerhead itself that inexplicably shoots off to the side like there is in my shower at home. It was nice! But you know what would’ve been nicer, especially after a four-hour hike under extremely dark, heavy clouds? A soaking tub.

It’s OK, though, because Hotel Willa was clear on the website that we’d have “a walk-in shower.” I knew what I was getting, but from my extensive research, I’ve learned this is not always the case. If I had taken a chance and booked a room with a “shower or tub” only to discover there was not a tub, I would have flooded the bathroom in protest, proving my point that there should be tub walls there to catch that water!! (OK, I obviously would not do that, I am a grown adult who considers herself a “good traveler”—but I would have asked to be moved to a room with a tub, much to the secondhand embarrassment of my partner.)

I would always rather have a bathtub, and a stay in a boutique hotel that drops buzzwords about relaxing and unwinding really should offer me the tools to do that the way I want to: reading a book and drinking a glass of wine in the bath. If you can’t do that for whatever reason, fine. But be honest with me, hotel advertising copywriters. I’m not dropping my hard earned cash or redeeming my less-hard-earned-but-still-somehow-worth-something credit card points for a mystery bathing situation.

(I want to be clear: This is a low-order problem. I am very aware of the horrors that are happening. Please for the love of god do not channel a BlueSky killjoy and comment that you can’t believe someone would complain about this as the fascist U.S. government is disappearing people. Because you know what everyone living through these scary-ass times deserves? A relaxing bath.)

Lest I nip my career as a hotel influencer in the bud before it starts, I will not be naming and shaming the websites where I’ve recently seen this deeply unhelpful phrasing. But I will recommend two hotels with excellent bathtubs that not only specifically noted the presence of tubs in the descriptions, but included pictures regarding their placement in the rooms (full and clear information is exactly what we need in 2025): Montecarmo12 in Lisbon and Amaria in southern Portugal.

Where are your favorite tubs? I (genuinely) want to know.

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