Hotels want you to feel at home: to slip into the robe and slippers, to serve yourself a cup of tea from the tray without a second thought. But the line that separates the hotel’s courtesy items from those we will have to return at the end of the stay is so fine that we cannot see it.
Industry experts say that most guests are perfectly well-behaved, but the cumulative impact of those small illicit keepsakes, multiplied by millions of visitors, ends up costing hotels hundreds of millions of dollars each year worldwide. And, while the stereotype is the luxury hotel guest stuffing soaps into a suitcase, reality tends to be stranger, more costly, and more common than many travelers imagine.
“It’s astonishing how many things you can take from a hotel,” says Anne Golden, a veteran hotelier at Pan Pacific London. “You can take the welcome amenities, the dry amenities, the disposable items.” She has also witnessed the opposite extreme: what she calls “the grabber guest”: “They take anything that isn’t attached to the room.”
Things you can take from the hotel
“Whoever says they have never taken anything is lying”, says travel advisor Pippa O’Keeffe. Fortunately, nobody expects that the next guest will take advantage of disposable hygiene products, boxes with dental hygiene kits, shower caps, combs, sewing kits, and mini soaps, so you can take them. Once opened, or even simply by placing them in the room, they are discarded and, from a purely operational point of view, it is more convenient for guests to take them than to throw them away. The same can be said for tea, coffee, sugar sachets, and welcome snacks. The house slippers are not so clear-cut, but most hotels assume that guests will take them, especially in higher-end properties, where washing them would not make sense. These doubts are reflected in guest behavior, and a recent YouGov survey shows that while more than three-quarters of respondents believe taking miniature hygiene products is acceptable, less than one in ten think so about towels, although both items usually end up tucked into a suitcase.
