Sleep. It’s the primary reason for the existence of hotels – to provide a place to sleep when you are away from home. Sure, there are other things you can do in a hotel room, like use the restroom, make phone calls and watch TV, but for the most part, it’s all about sleep.

Why then would a hotel purposefully disable the “sleep” function on the TV remote control?

I personally don’t have an answer to that question, and so can’t imagine that any hotel chain would go to the trouble to disable the sleep function. But based on several stays at Marriott’s, slalom seems to believe the hotel might be doing this very thing.

Am I going crazy or has Marriott recently disabled functions on its TV remote controls? … In the past two weeks I’ve stayed at 3 different properties (two in Boston and one in Chicago), and the function key on the remote hasn’t worked!

At the time of this writing, no one else seems to have any idea either why a hotel would disable the sleep function. The HDMI ports though, well that’s another story…

At the Marriott in Raleigh, NC they disabled HDMI ports on their TV. The technician that I called to troubleshoot the problem (I was trying to connect my Mac to the TV via HDMI) “confidentially” told me that Marriott doing this so the people wouldn’t stream over their WIFI through the computers to a TV. ~foxberg

I recently found the HDMI ports physically disabled on the TVs in a Hyatt I recently stayed at. Like they put a screw through them or something. ~iflyrtw

The obvious question seems to be: Are the hotels disabling these items, or are other guests breaking them and the hotel simply isn’t bothering to fix them? My bet would be on the latter – despite what the maintenance guy in Raleigh says. I just can’t imagine why a hotel might not want a guest to use the sleep function. Or for that matter, why they would care if you streamed content to the TV.

Read the thread in its entirety: Marriott disabled functions on TV remote control