Name: Why Americans Fell Out Of Love With The Hotel Minibar
Uploaded: 2025-06-23T02:55:52.000Z
Duration: 7 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We've all been there, countless hours of traveling, arriving at a hotel at odd hours, tired, hungry, and tempted by the ultimate convenience the hotel has to offer, the minibar.

But a can of soda, a bag of stale chips, and a candy bar at 3 a.m. adds up.

In fact, it costs about 80% to 400% more than what you paid for at the store.

You wanted it and then you see the bill two days later.

Initially the minibar was put in rooms, it was a novelty, and then it sort of devolved into an annoyance, and minibars got the comedic punchline of being undersized and overpriced.

But the sentiment around minibars wasn't always negative.

In its heyday, minibars were often paired with the feeling of luxury and the allure of traveling.

But the convenience factor wore off, becoming a hassle for guests, and an even bigger hassle for hotels.

Traditional minibar operation would never be profitable, they would always lose money.

It is seen to be one of the worst operations at the hotel level.

Operational costs climbed, theft was rampant, food spoiled, and guest preferences shifted.

CNBC looked at why the once-essential amenity became obsolete.

The minibar didn't go global until 1974, when a Hilton hotel in Hong Kong started stocking its in-room fridges with tiny liquor bottles, inspired by airlines.

Then comes cocktail time, offered with the compliments of your host airline.

Drink sales soared 500% that year, boosting Hilton's overall revenue by 5%.

Soon, minibars expanded beyond alcohol, adding sodas, snacks, and candy.

Hilton even standardized offerings so guests could expect the same selections no matter where they stayed.

Guests that travel want to see items that they would find in their own fridge at home.

That's why when you have Coke items or M&Ms, it would always be a bit more profitable.

In the early days, operations were simple.

Guests or hotel staff would make no of what the guests had taken.

As hotels began to fill each room with minibars, the amenity became a burden.

By the early aughts, some chains began phasing out the minibar altogether, citing rising operational costs and declining usage as primary drivers.

But besides the financial losses, the logistical nightmare of constantly checking and restocking proved to be a strain on hotels.

One factor that led to the, I guess, the demise of the fully stocked minibar, and that's rising labor cost and the cost replenishing these in addition to cleaning the rooms.

One minibar attendant can visit about 100 rooms per day.

Since not every guest would consume from the minibar, it could take days before a guest or hotel staff discovered that the content of the bottles wasn't actually vodka or whiskey, but instead water or tea.

Guests would dispute all charges, contributing to a time consuming and costly headache.

For years, one of Marriott's largest locations in Times Square had eight full time staffers working its 150 minibars.

But by 2004, that location moved all of them.

The proliferation of smart minibars was an effort to improve efficiency.

Everything is online and you would know where to go to visit those rooms to refill those items instead of going to visit every single room in the hotel.

Bartek is one of the leaders in smart minibars.

The company works with 1,400 hotels worldwide.

Majority of them are luxury and high end properties.

Only about one in three guests use a minibar if available to them.

So for a hotel with 100 rooms, roughly 33 of them generate about $400 in revenue on a daily basis.

Despite their modest usage, automated minibars pay themselves in 9 to 18 months and typically last up to a decade.

Today, manually operated minibars are pretty much obsolete.

Agario believes they're underused in mid-scale hotels because the value customer can't justify spending at the minibar.

The average daily rate is the most important factor.

For example, if the room rate was $75 per night, it's unlikely you would purchase a $5 room.

Between 2007 and 2012, minibar revenues at hotels dropped by 28 percent, while hotel lounge bars saw a 5 percent rise.

Surveyed U.S. travelers ranked minibars as their least desired amenity at a hotel.

Eventually, hotels emptied their minibars altogether, letting guests use them for their own food and drinks.

Instead, lobbies are becoming more of a focal point.

When you think about hotel lobbies, they went through three stages and I call them three C's, communication, commerce and community.

So in the beginning, hotel lobbies were just a place for you to communicate with, you know, desk agent.

And then the advent of putting in revenue generating amenities in the lobby so that you can have a bar, you might have a little grab and go, a little restaurant.

And then in the most recent redo of hotel lobbies, a lot of brands have realized that they also need communal spaces.

Over the years, you've seen the evolution, much like an open floor plan, really coming and also with a little bit of labor, thinking that there could be more synergies and that you could start to really fuse together.

And it's hard to distinguish, really, am I sitting in the bar or am I sitting in the lobby?

All of this is really to draw guests out of their room.

In recent years, delivery apps have seen a rise in popularity among hotel guests, offering easy access to plenty of options among local restaurants without the need to leave the hotel room.

Wyndham teamed up with DoorDash in 2019, offering $0 delivery fees and 2,000 signup points at its over 3,700 locations in the U.S.

Marriott and Uber began its partnership in 2021, letting guests earn hotel points when ordering with Uber Eats from designated hotels.

In 2024, Hilton named Grubhub its go-to delivery service, giving guests perks like a free month of Grubhub Plus.

For example, the share of Uber Eats Marriott customers grew twice as much as non-Marriott customers between 2019 and 2025.

Instead of having room service open till 2, 3 in the morning where they might get very few orders, they used to basically have guests order room service from the entire location.

So if you're in a city, all restaurants in town that deliver are on your room service menu.

While value and mid-scale hotels have done away with the minibar almost entirely, there are some segments that still find a need for them at their hotels.

Boutique hotels have reinvented the minibar concept by replacing generic snacks and drinks with curated displays of local goods.

Luxury hotels have gone even further, offering specific guests fully customized minibars that they could choose from.

With delivery apps and lobby marketplaces offering more convenient options, the once iconic minibar must now evolve or risk becoming obsolete altogether.

But if you have to check in every room, you will lose the house even if you sell cokes for $10.

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Why Americans Fell Out Of Love With The Hotel Minibar

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