No, not the smell when you're seated near the toilet.
It isn’t just your resort’s signature fragrance wafting through the lobby or the aromatherapy kit in your bathroom. During the seemingly endless pandemic, it’s also the solutions used to clean the public areas in airports, train stations and hotel lobbies. They’re giving us a headache.
Airlines, car rental companies, cruise lines and hotels added many of these smelly solutions during the pandemic to make customers feel safer, says consumer psychologist Michal Strahilevitz, who teaches marketing at St. Mary’s College of California. Reassuring passengers with the scent of cleansers, she says, makes perfect sense, because many of us have been taught since childhood that this is what clean and safe smells like. In reality, it has nothing to do with either.
The worst are restrooms, Markowski says, some of which have motion-triggered deodorizers that emit a thick floral odor. “What they are actually doing is contributing to indoor air pollution.”
But there’s a larger issue at play here: The travel industry as a whole needs to rethink its use of scents. There are already so many things that companies use to manipulate travelers. Smells shouldn’t be one of them.
She says she also avoids airports with chemical sprayers, such as Phoenix Sky Harbor. “I do my best not to connect there,” she says.
I know I'm not that bright, but I always interpreted such smells as a sign of cleanliness, not realizing it's the same air freshener people use in cars to cover up the reality.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/04/20/travel-smells/