a black tile floor with water on it
Photograph ©2024 by Brian Cohen.
Brian Cohen·
Experiences
··7 Comments·2 min read

Showers in Europe: What Am I Doing Wrong?

Please answer the question and do not leave me out to dry.

With regard to showers in Europe, what am I doing wrong? Although they seem to be becoming less commonplace, I continue to encounter showers in hotel rooms that only have a partial partition and cannot be completely enclosed — including three just this past week in Northern Ireland and in Ireland…

Showers in Europe: What Am I Doing Wrong?

…which results with the floor immediately outside of the shower becoming wet. I cannot even place a bath mat or towel in front of the shower area because it will become soaked and useless by the time I am finished showering.

The photograph that is featured at the top of this article was taken after I showered only last night in Londonderry in Northern Ireland; while the photograph of a shower and bath tub with a partial enclosure shown below was take only hours ago in Galway in Ireland.

a shower with a shower head and shower head
Photograph ©2024 by Brian Cohen.

The following text is an excerpt from this article called Partial Shower Partitions in Europe: Why? that was published on Friday, October 3, 2014 — yes, almost ten years ago…

How is someone supposed to shower without spritzing all over the place and causing a big wet mess on the floor in the remainder of the bathroom?

I try and I try. I turn the shower head towards the tiled wall and I try to shower that way. I minimize the mess – but there is still a mess.

As far as placing a bath towel mat on the floor, I pretty much gave up on that as it typically gets soaked — unless I can push it off to the side to keep it relatively dry and yet still reach it with my foot upon exiting the shower.

…and I still have no idea how to keep the floor of the bathroom reasonably dry when I take a shower in a partial enclosure — even with a shower head that is adjustable or with a sprayer.

Perhaps I am crazy; but I prefer to step out of the shower onto a dry bath mat or floor towel.

Final Boarding Call

At least the partial enclosure of the shower which is featured in the photograph below is curved, which does help to prevent a wet bathroom floor — somewhat, anyway. That shower with its curved partial enclosure was in a hotel room in Belfast in Northern Ireland.

a shower with a glass door
Photograph ©2024 by Brian Cohen.

Europeans tend to get a number of things right. Partial shower enclosures do not seem to be one of them. Whoever designed these ridiculous atrocities must have also designed bags of milk in Canada.

See also

Then again, showers with partial partitions have been used around Europe for decades — so perhaps I am doing something wrong? What are the secrets to using showers with partial enclosures without getting water on the bathroom floor?

What do you do when you encounter a partial shower partition — besides take a shower, of course?

All photographs ©2024 by Brian Cohen.

Related

7 Comments

  1. Same situation last week in two 300. PEr night Norway hotels.
    I think they want to encourage you to shower less time and use less water.

    Reply

  2. You’re not doing anything wrong, per se. The reason largely has to do with the (lack of) space and ease of cleaning. A hinged glass door is preferred but often there is not enough space for the door to swing outwards into the bathroom. The alternative would be a framed sliding glass door (terrible to clean) or a shower curtain which would need to be replaced between each guest.

    Second, many bathrooms in Europe (and Asia) are meant to get wet and often include a drain in the floor for that reason… So some water on the floor is not a problem when the bathroom is easy to hose down and clean.

    Reply

  3. The partial glass enclosure for hotel room showers is something I first encountered with Radisson hotels in Europe 25+ years ago. Disliked them then and still dislike them. It seemed like they wanted to go cheap on glass and installment/maintenance/cleaning/repair costs and still be more “modern” than a shower curtain.

    I am not sure the wetfloor bathrooms are really there to encourage less use of water when showering. To drive down water usage in the showers, they instead focus on putting on new shower fixtures to throttle the water flow and/or increase the aeration of the water spray.

    Across much of the EU, I find that hotels with quick-dry wet floor bathrooms tend to be more likely to have higher water pressure and higher water flow in the hotel room showers/tubs than those that aren’t designed as quick dry wet-floor bathrooms. If the bathroom floor gets super wet when I shower and doesn’t stay wet for hours, I am likely to use just as much water during my next shower in the same bathroom. Most others probably do take more mitigation efforts on subsequent showers, but not I.

    If you have a small marble or rubber ball, you can place it on the floor in the corners of the bathroom and see where it rolls. If the object roll toward the drain and onto the floor drain in the bathroom, then the bathroom shouldn’t remain flooded after you shower with a lot of water. That said, it’s an interesting sign when the bathroom has a floor squeegee in it, like my Stockholm hotel room had earlier this week — I had to use it to clear the water down back toward the drain from a very basic bathroom that was 120 square feet in size and meant to be a wheelchair accessible bathroom.

    Reply

  4. Have visited eight European countries in the past 2 years and totally agree with you. I never understood the half pane of glass deal myself. Makes no sense, the water splatters all over the place and makes a mess. And no, I don’t get it either. Yes, I have seen people comment that there are like “40 countries in Europe” as if your experience is an outlier. From my experience, it is not. And, we’ve rented some apartments via Booking.com and the twist I’ve experienced there is a shower with no curtain (or place for one) at all – just that it’s at the end of an elongated room.

    It’s like their apparent disdain for ide and air conditioning: I don’t get it, but I guess it’s cultural.

    Reply

  5. See that photo with the folded up towel at the entrance to the shower and the curved screen? That is not a towel!!!
    You will find that it is slightly thicker than all the other towels. It’s called a bath mat and is designed to be placed on the floor outside of the shower to keep the floor dry. Afterwards, you hang it up to dry.
    I do hope you haven’t been using these to dry yourself as often they are not washed in the same way (or as often) as the towels provided.
    This is the answer to your problem

    Reply

    1. Those bath mat/floor towels should actually be washed at least as well or better than the bath towels intended for people to dry their bodies with after bathing/showering. But never count on hotel housekeeping to not try to re-use those bath mat/floor towels meant to be used to dry the bottom of the feet when coming out of a shower/bath or who knows what else.

      Many hotels in northern Europe have literally no shower curtain nor glass/plastic partition to stop the water from splashing out of the “shower” area in the bathtubs. But the interesting thing is that sometimes these very hotels where the tubs have no shower curtain/glass/plastic partition to stop the water from splashing out of the showering area have other rooms in the same building with just a shower stall and then typically those shower stalls are pretty much fully enclosed. I now take it that a hotel room with a bathtub is more likely to be an upgraded room type than a room without a bathtub, but if you want to minimize the chances of shower water flowing around the hotel room bathroom, try to get a room without a bathtub and make sure it’s not a “handicap accessible” type room — but then you’re less likely to get the best room types in the hotel.

      Reply

    2. Yes, but as noted in the article, the floor mats just end up getting soaked and you don’t have anything to stand on when you get out of the shower except a soaked and slippery bath mat. To me it is a safety hazard if you get out of a shower and have to contend with a wet, slippery floor and no bath mat to mop it up or an inadequate bath mat. This whole half shower enclosure thing is right up there on the list of things that are annoying for me, along with no vent in the bathroom and never cleaned AC ducts/vents so the mold and dust in the room are off the charts. There are a lot of things I love about traveling for work- this is not one of them.

      Reply

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