A VIDEO showing cleaners using toilet brushes to clean cups in the guestrooms of three five-star hotels in Harbin, Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, has gone viral online. On Wednesday, the local health department said the video is true and they have been talking with the hotels. Beijing News comments:

There have been similar video clips online in the past, but none of them has created such a stir as this one. The logic is clear: If five-star hotels still treat their customers' health in this way, who else can we trust?
Some say the incidents are individual cases. Maybe, but they have happened too frequently. And worse, one of the three hotels involved in the scandal this time was subject to a similar scandal in September. At that time, they responded that they would "take all necessary measures to make sure our service standards apply to all branches".

In the video, the cleaner who did not know she was being recorded suggested it is common practice. If what she said is true, the whole hotel industry needs reform.

Even if the case happened in some hotels, rather than all, that still reveals some deep problems with the inner management system of the hotels involved. They do not train their cleaning staff properly, nor the staff that are supposed to supervise the cleaners.

Besides inner control, national regulations for the hotel industry are also necessary. It is absurd that we have national standards for rating hotels, and the supervisory agencies are supposed to check the hotels once a year. However, the fact that such scandals happen in five-star hotels shows the national standards are not well implemented. It is time we strengthened our measures to better regulate the hotel industry, so as to prevent such scandals from happening again.