Forty winks. Shut-eye. A few Zs. No matter what you call it, a good sleep is often one of the hardest things to experience when you are travelling for business. Early morning starts to get to busy airports, jet lag, long meetings and late nights spent entertaining clients all conspire to make a decent kip extremely hard to come by.

When you do manage to find an agreeable place to sleep, it can be wonderful. So what are the crucial ingredients for a good night’s rest?

Good quality linen is essential. You want to slide between the sheets and feel that crisp freshness that makes you go ‘aah’. Many hotels now boast about the thread count (the number of threads per square inch of sheet). The higher the thread count, the softer the linen is likely to feel although suppliers of bed linen have now got wise to this and started using all sorts of ploys to increase the thread count. Despite this, anything above 200 should feel very soft.

Denell Pepin, a product trend analyst at textiles industry body Cotton Incorporated, says: “Finer threads create a more delicate sheet…Using a finer thread allows more thread to fit in a square inch measure, creating a softer and smoother fabric.”

It is also hard to underestimate the importance of a good pillow. Hotels in the know have employed pillow butlers who can come to your room with a choice of pillows of different levels of plumpness. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas has a Dream Butler service offering 14 different types of pillow and herbal teas to send you off to sleep.

Even in hotels without such services, a good selection of pillows, either on the bed or tucked away in a wardrobe is good.

Not everyone wants to sleep beneath that Continental import, the duvet, preferring instead the more traditional sheets and blanket combo. But even traditionalists will agree that the bed linen should not seem as though if it has been vacuum-packed to the bed. Some sheets are so tightly tucked in that getting them off to go to bed is harder than removing the sealed top from a bottle of milk.

What hoteliers have finally realised is that you spend the majority of your time in your hotel room in your bed so it makes sense to make it as comfortable as possible.

A good hotel bed will also be at least as big as the one you have at home. You want to feel special and the bed the size of a football pitch is the way to achieve this but not so big that it leaves only a narrow channel between the bed and the wall. Having to turn sideways to get in and out of bed is enough to make anyone grumpy. Achieving a large bed by pushing together two singles is definitely not on either.

Protection from external noise is vital. Business hotels, by their very nature, tend to be in city centre locations, with all the hubbub that goes with that. Having good windows that keep out the noise of the eight-lane motorway below is vital. Often, though, the biggest source of noise comes from neighbouring rooms rather than the street.

Mark Kirkby, rooms division manager at London’s Sheraton Park Tower, is frequently confronted with sleep problems. “One guest came to reception advising that he could not sleep – he was from the US and his time zones were out. We suggested that we could open the Fitness Centre for him so that he could exercise to make him tired,” he says.

Mr Kirkby has also bought black-out fabric to make a room completely dark and provided teddy bears to lonely business travellers.