At least four luxury international hotel chains have been forced to apologise after hidden camera video revealed the unsavoury practices of their room cleaners.

The 11-minute video, entitled The Secrets of Cups, shows cleaners wiping cups and sinks with dirty towels and sponges. Some use the same towel to wipe the toilet seat.

The Shangri-La Hotel in Fuzhou said the actions in the video violate its hygiene standards, while the Park Hyatt in Beijing called it an isolated occurrence.

The Waldorf Astoria in Shanghai and the Sheraton in Guiyang city also apologised and said they were reviewing their procedures.

An activist blogger who uses the pseudonym “Hua Zong” posted the video late on Thursday on his verified social media account on Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter.

The video was picked up by Chinese state-run newspaper the Beijing News and had been viewed more that 28 million times by Friday morning (ADT).

Among the unhygienic practices, one cleaner is shown wiping cups, the sink and the mirror with a dirty bath towel which had been thrown on the floor.

Another uses the remaining drops from an open bottle of shampoo to clean cups, while another retrieves a supposedly disposable cup cover from a rubbish bin places it back onto a washed glass.

Hilton and Marriott group properties were among the 14 luxury hotels included in the video.

Hua Zong told the South China Morning Post-owned website Inkstone that the video highlighted an endemic problem with the Chinese hotel industry.

“This is not a problem for rich people only, it’s a problem for everyone,” he was quoted as saying.

“If even the best hotels in the industry are working like this, how can you trust other hotels?”

Beijing tourism authorities issued a statement requiring hotels to check and rectify their practices. It also said it had asked the Beijing health commission to conduct sanitary inspections of four of the hotels named in the video.