If your hotel room has a mini-bar, check to make sure that all the bottles are sealed as soon as you arrive.
Some guests drink the beverages and refill the bottles with water or tea to avoid the high charges. If this goes undetected by hotel staff until after your stay (they do check for it, but aren’t necessarily always diligent about it), the items will be charged to your credit card.
If you find unsealed bottles, report it to the front desk right away.
I’m of the opinion that there are two kinds of hotel guest – one that is so scared of the hotel minibar that they’ll refuse to be handed the key, and one that makes it one of the first things they check out in their room.
I’m one of the latter – and find that the contents of the minibar says a lot about the quality of the hotel chain. A low end hotel chain may offer nothing more than a couple of bottles of water and some full size cans of soda. High end hotels may have as much as $2000 of items behind the door (their prices, not retail prices).
I’ve collected some of the weirdest things I’ve come across in the hotel minibar. And before you ask – yes, I too hate the automated minibar where a mere touch of the door makes a computer think you robbed the place.
W Hotel, Times Square New York
Many hotels know that their guests might/will get a bit frisky when they enter the room, and most of them understand that their guests don’t always carry “protection”. For that reason, the minibar may be where you’ll often find an assortment of intimacy products. The W Hotel at Times Square takes adult fun a little further with their “sex in the sheets” product. Sure, it isn’t really a minibar item, but it certainly is worth mentioning in this lineup.
For $18, someone will come up to your room with ice cream, a bunch of toppings and plastic sheets. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what these are for. Add $20 and you get a disposable camera. Kinky!
Edgewater Hotel, Seattle
The Edgewater is one of my personal favorites in Seattle. The whole place just feels more like home than most hotels, down to the contents of their minibar. Sure, they have the regular overpriced booze and soda, but they are also the only hotel I know of that will gladly sell you a teddy bear or rubber duck. Sure, some people may claim they want it for their kid back home, but I’m sure there are guests that gladly spend the $40 to have a companion to keep them company in their bed.
Hotel Rivington, New York
The hotel on Rivington is one of those hotels that tells a lot about itself just by looking at the minibar. This thing has it all – from full size bottles of Champagne to six (yes, six) different “intimacy products”. They also have T-Shirts, full bottles of Patron and $6 gummi bears. You can instantly tell this is an expensive minibar, because they don’t stock any regular soda, but they do have 8 different flavors of juice.
With the amazing view from their rooms, and the Tempur-Pedic bed, it is no surprise that they keep these items in the minibar, it is a very romantic hotel.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen in a mini bar, and what sort of mini bar traveler are you? Do you sometimes accept the usurious prices for a cold beer or a packet of honey roasted peanuts, or do you only consume items you can easily replenish from the 7-11 down the road?
And is checking out the contents of the mini bar the first thing you do in a new hotel room?
Traveling for Lonely Planet, I don’t actually stay in mini bar equipped hotels much any more, but the occasional press trip for other folk does allow the mini thrill of seeing what’s on offer. A trip to Sydney once revealed everything from condoms to effervescent vitamin B hangover tablets (Do you have Berocca in the States?)
In a previous life I traveled a bit for business, and can safely say that an overpriced bottle of Tiger beer, a chilled Toblerone bar, and Mythbusters on the telly is as good an antidote as any to an eleven flight from Auckland to Singapore.
Thanks to Carla Michele on Flickr for the pic.