My husband and I have traveled a lot over the years.

Mostly for business and we usually enjoyed it, but what we don’t enjoy are the hotels. Bleach cleaners, mold, carpeting, polyester (plastic) sheets, old pillows. It’s a toxic load neither of us want on our bodies and neither of us look forward to. It’s one of the pieces of our own journey that led us to start Healthy Vacation Club, but we’ve had to learn how to cope with what’s available until we can cover the world with healthy vacation homes and hotels.

What do we do?

1. We choose better hotels.

We’ve tried a lot of hotels, unfortunately. We’ve been to highly rated resorts that had been soaked in bleach and large brand hotels covered in mold. Don’t be afraid to walk away, there are always more hotels. In our experience, we’ve always gotten our money back… even if it one time took 6 months and multiple calls.

Our main hotel chain has ended up being Hilton, basically because we’ve had the fewest problems there. Not surprisingly, we’ve learned that:

“Gary Collinge, general manager of the Hilton Vancouver Airport, says all Hilton hotels follow standards regarding eco-friendly cleaning solutions, including non-toxic, non-phosphate, non-chlorine and biodegradable products.” – Hotelier Magazine

Sometimes we’ve also had good luck with Hyatt. Of course, they’re all far from perfect, and I wouldn’t call either of them “healthy”, but they are doing some good things that make it a bit easier for us to stay there compared to other hotels. I would love the opportunity to work with any of them to start pushing the hotel industry to a place more focused on wellness. For us, it’s not about competing, it’s about making change happen quickly in the vacation industry, because there’s such a great need for it.

2. We cook our own food.

For a stay longer than 1-2 nights, we make sure the hotel room has a kitchen/kitchenette. They’ll often have stainless steel pans, but we usually pack small pan and wooden spatula just in case they only have Teflon pans and plastic spatulas. If we can drive to the hotel, then we always bring our Instant Pot Mini, regardless of if the hotel has a kitchen or not. We do always make sure we have a fridge in the room. Hilton has been good about being able to bring a fridge up to the room if there is none to begin with.

We also make sure we know where we’re going to buy food. That means, depending on which State we’re in, we look for a Sprout’s Farmers Market, Lucky’s Market, Whole Foods, or similar, and pick a hotel in that area of the city. We book as close as possible to the event we’re attending, but for larger conferences like Natural Products Expo West in LA, where we usually need to book a hotel that’s 5-7 miles from the event, we usually pick the one that puts a Sprout’s on our way to the hotel.

3. We bring our own air filter.

In addition to getting rid of the dust that many times is attached to flame retardants and other chemicals, many air filters also help filter out mold and even mycotoxins.

If traveling by car, we usually bring a small air purifier with us and plug it in as soon as we check in to the hotel. This was especially important for me while my body was the most reactive to chemicals, but we still chose to bring one with us every time we travel by car.

4. We bring castile soap.

It’s something simple, but we don’t want to use scented hand soaps, body soaps, and dish soap (if we have a kitchen). Instead, we have a travel sized bottle of castile soap with us and use it for everything. (I actually always keep a travel sized bottle in my pure and use that whenever we wash our hands outside of our home).

5. We bring socks and sheets or full-length PJ’s.

Since we’re sleeping on sheets in hotels that usually are made of polyester (plastic) and have been washed in chemicals we know nothing about, we like to have something on to keep our bodies from absorbing all of that, and we typically bring pillowcases with us so we at least get an organic cotton barrier between our face and the hotel pillow. Ever since we became parents, we also started bringing an organic fitted sheet with us as well. Sure, it takes up some space in the suitcase, but to us it’s worth it.

We also always bring socks with us even if I won’t be wearing any shoes that need socks. Being from Sweden where we don’t carpet rooms, I find them disgusting, and since we don’t know what powders and cleaners have been used on the carpet (not to mention the flame-retardant chemicals added at time of production), we would rather protect our feet with socks inside the hotel room.