Good news for slobs: These hotel rooms clean themselves

Ever since we were kids, people have been telling us to clean up after ourselves. Well guess what, guys. Thanks to technology, now we don’t have to. Copenhagen’s Hotel Herman K and the new Hotel Ottilia integrate technology that allows the rooms to fully disinfect themselves each morning, without any humans lifting a single one of their lazy little fingers. That’s right: Cleaning up after ourselves is just another useless thing we learned in kindergarten, like what sound a cow makes.

Bloomberg reports that the hotels’ parent company, Brochner Hotels, has partnered with Danish company ACT.Global to cover the room in its ACT CleanCoat technology, a Teflon-like coating that is transparent, odorless, and activated by sunlight. (You can get a sense of the science behind the tech from this TED Talk.) While it sounds like a recipe for a toxic wonderland, the main ingredient is titanium dioxide, which is found in most sunscreens.

Since the internet is filled with cautionary tales of what not to touch in hotel rooms (remote controls! bathtubs! telephones!) lest you bring back E.Coli and salmonella as souvenirs for your stay, CleanCoat could be a game changer for germaphobe travelers. Denmark’s National Research Centre for the Working Environment found that CleanCoat’s antibacterial spray could do away with influenza and salmonella as well as mold spores and allergens. The coating can also allegedly purify the air for up to a year, banish contaminants, and get rid of all traces of cigarette smoke or other odors left behind by rude guests.

State-of-the-art hotel rooms aren’t cheap, of course, and CleanCoat reportedly runs about $2,500 per room. However, the Brochner Hotel CEO hopes to recoup some of the costs by cutting water consumption, “never spilling [bleach] on carpets,” and reducing the labor load, by speeding up the cleaning process for staff, who can focus on vacuuming up your Cheetos crumbs instead of disinfecting the counters.