Is there a reason for heavy doors in hotels?

Sure, they’re fire doors.

But they are also commercial doors. Any commercial door is going to feel heavy, since it’s built out of solid wood or steel. Contrast with a family residence interior door, made of <= 1/8″ veneer luaun plywood (already light) and cardboard honeycomb or foam. There’s no substantial wood except where hinges and knobs go. They can be fine doors if the honeycomb is glued to the veneer, but they are utterly unfit for hotel-room door service. You could kick right through them.

This is residential “normal”. Hotel doors are the opposite of this.

Doorknobs too – a commercial class 1 lever doorknob can weigh 5 pounds even without the card scanner. Whereas a residential privacy knob set is a few ounces.

The door latch mechanism is also heavy and commercial, and so needs a bit of an “action” to close with surety.

Part of this is driven by ADA requirements (slow closer, lever handles, positive latching) and fire codes too – the tuckback levers are to prevent snagging fire hoses or a fireman’s gear and knocking him off his feet.

There is also a noise problem solved by having heavy doors. A normal door like used inside houses would provide poor sound isolation creating privacy problems. Also in the hotel room you would hear people walking and talking in the hallway, even if they were not doing that in a loud way.

The banging is often due to automatic closing devices, which are required on fire doors in many places, and tend to be set to ensure locking.

These are adjustable in two sections: the main part of the range of movement and the last few degrees. They often come set to close most of the range quite slowly, then to shut the last bit quite quickly to ensure the door closes tightly and latches securely. While it’s possible to adjust them to close the last little bit slowly, this isn’t desirable from the point of view of security, as the door may rest on the latch and not lock. Realistically these closers are unpacked and fitted, but not adjusted from the factory settings unless the door doesn’t shut properly, because that takes time (a few minutes per door IME), and time is money.

I have adjusted the one on a hotel room, because the door closed very slowly and let all the heat into the cold corridor before banging shut. I know what’s possible from having set these things up in labs, where the vibration of the door banging would be a problem.

But of course it tends to be the other rooms that disturb you, and you can’t do a lot about them. Even earplugs are of limited use for the low frequencies that carry a lot of the power in the noise.

They are called “Fire Doors”. They’re heavy so that they would be able to stop a fire coming into or spreading out of your room. The safety aspect outweighs the noise issue.

Jim MacKenzie is right that they are fire doors, which is why they are so heavy, but that doesn’t address the reason that other heavy doors don’t seem to make as much noise.

I believe the greater noise actually has to do with the acoustics of the hotel hallway – almost always a bare unadorned long and narrow space – the perfect shape for echos and reverberations. Offices often have wide open areas such as “cube farms” nearby, they often have many doors on the hallway open at once, and they are much more likely to have people in them whose bodies and clothes deaden the noise.

As proof, I offer two apartment buildings in my neighborhood. One is built similarly to most hotels – long narrow (and slightly curved, but that doesn’t make a difference) hallways – and the other has shorter hallways with groups of apartments accessible by different entrances. They both use extremely similar building materials and fire doors, but the first one echoes significantly (you can hear a door close from 20-30 apartments away on the other side of the building) and the second one you can hear your neighbor’s door but not the next apartment past your neighbor.

They’re fire doors. They have a fire rating, that describes how long they can survive a fire burning on either side of them. This fire rating means a fire in a room will give safe passage in the hallway outside for a significant period of time (perhaps an hour or more), or allow a fire to rage outside in the corridor while people in the room have a period of safety. They are required by fire codes in various countries.

Similarly, larger apartment buildings in many countries have similar fire code requirements.

You’ll notice doors on stairways and in other locations have similar traits, and for the same reasons. These doors must always be closed, or must have some sort of automatic mechanism that will close them automatically in the event that a fire alarm is triggered.