Sort of interesting to think about the fact that used mattresses are a no-go for people, but they'll gladly sleep on hotel beds used by orders of magnitude more people.
Don't think I'd buy a used mattress either though...
I think bedding is actually the thing that makes me most uneasy at hotels, you just don't have a choice. You can expect they wash the sheets with each new guest, but I don't think they do so with the comforter which grosses me out. Then there is the whole bed-bug situation...
ultimately people prefer not to stop and think about the fact that hotel beds are kinda gross, since there's really no alternative if you want to travel to a place where you don't know anyone.
but even if you do acknowledge this, it's not nearly as bad to sleep in a "dirty" bed for a few nights as it would be to own one and use it every night.
I once met someone who always traveled with something a bit like a thin cotton (silk?) full body sleeping bag (like a mummy bag). Idea was you never physically touched the hotel bed. It was apparently expensive.
The funny thing to me was the she stayed in high end hotels pretty exclusively who I think you can at least be taking a fairly aggressive kill-it-with-bleach approach to laundry. I wondered if there was a wallmart version aimed at people who stay in seedy motels where it would seem to be more practical.
There are brand ones that are rather expensive, but at least in Europe I know that decathlon makes really cheap silk and cotton sleeping bag liners, because that's where I got mine.
They are made to go into sleeping bags, and I love mine for that use case (less sweat and dirt in your down bag), but I have also used them in dirt cheap hostels.
In one seedy hotel in Italy several people in my party had a lot of bedbug bites, but I can't say for sure if it actually protected me. I expect I was probably just lucky that there were none in my room.
Still, it's a little over 100 grams (less than 4 ounces) and it makes dirty mattresses in shitty hostels bearable.
That said, as someone who travels a lot, when I look at travelers' catalogs like Magellan at a lot of the safety, germ protection, etc. items, part of me thinks that people who buy all that stuff are probably better off just not traveling.
They're definitely abusing the word 'most' there. I've stayed in easily 20 hostels at this point, and not once has a 'sleep sack' been required. And in all my hostel research, I have never stumbled across someone mentioning they needed one.
I don't think I have on the relatively limited occasions I've stayed in a hostel (or a mountain hut). That said, I'd certainly heard of sleep sacks sometimes being used/required in hostels. So it can't be all that rare--or maybe it used to be more common.
Makes sense I guess although I've never run into that requirement.
By description the thing she had was much smaller & more form fitting than above link. One of the "selling points" was how small it packed into carry-on, for example.
Don't think I'd buy a used mattress either though...