Luxury hotel amenities can elevate personal spaces and connect you with a property and your trip memories long after you’ve returned home. Hotels are making it harder than ever to take them with you. But you can buy many of these items online, and you’ll be surprised how inexpensive they are.
I started using Aesop bath products after first staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Every time I hear The Jesus and Mary Chain singing “Just Like Honey” I’m brought back to that hotel. Luxury properties like that one still offer individual toiletry bottles.
Park Hyatt Tokyo
You bring them home and connect your memory of the hotel when you’re home. Maybe you even took the extras from your room each day, stashing them as soon as housekeeping replenished your bathroom. Your guest bath at home may even be done in an amenity theme of your favorite property. Hyatt used to encourage this!
This is all a lot harder in hotels that are more mid and install wall-mounted bulk toiletries. But you can still bring their bath products into your home. You don’t actually need to be a hotel to order them online – and many of the products are sold in individual sizes. It can even be cheaper than retail!
Maybe you like Pharmacopia, common at Best Western Plus, Hyatt Regency, and Hawthorne Suites?
Hyatt Regency Sydney
If you need notepads for your desk, why not Holiday Inn guestroom notepads – as of this writing $10.77 for 500 (marked down from $98.99)?
Hotel slippers are available for 99 cents apiece with minimum order of 10. That sort of makes American’s big soft goods improvement offering slippers in business class to Europe, Asia Pacific and deep South America – and no longer just restricted to ultra-long haul flights – seem a little less generous.
United Airlines Polaris slippers
And maybe a Marriott Bonvoy welcome mat for your front door at home? Here are a plethora of Hilton items too, by the way, in case you don’t feel like Bonvoying your guests.
What each one of us considers a luxury differs. Twenty five years ago I might have included a Sheraton stay. That brand was once synonymous with entry-level luxury. I still get choked up at their Belong campaign.
The memories we have at hotels, and associate with our stays, are enduring – made even more so by the little physical connections we bring with us. So many chains have made that harder to do through cost-cutting wall-mounted dreck, replacing individual bottles.
If chains cared about ‘the environment’ and quality they’d stock rooms with individual biodegradable packages. Housekeeping wouldn’t forget to refill the bottles. Properties wouldn’t fill them with cheap substitutes. And guests wouldn’t put foreign substances on them. But you can still buy your own memories.
We also adopted the Aesop toiletries at home after encountering them at the Park Hyatt Seoul. Probably have spent $1000 on them since… I hope they get a good discount for advertising!
REFUSE single use. Individual “biodegradable” bottles are not a thing, the degradation timeline is thousands of years if ever. We need to care for our planet much more urgently than that. There has never been a single instance of a guest contaminating the refillable bottles with anything of consequence. How do I know, because if somebody got an STD from Marriott shampoo, it’d be covered on this blog, which I read multiple times a day.
Mandarin Oriental hotels and most (maybe not all yet) Ritz Carltons phased out single use toiletries. So have W Hotels and the last Four Seasons hotel I stayed at.
Single use plastic toiletry packaging is becoming a thing of the past and “single use biodegradable packages” would be too costly and lacking a luxury feel/presentation. Bulk toiletries are the way of the future.
Time to move on.
@High class professional says:
“There has never been a single instance of a guest contaminating the refillable bottles with anything of consequence.”
I just did something in the empty shampoo bottle at the Courtyard. It rhymes with jack.
There you go.
Thanks, @Nick, I needed the laugh.
For all the gushing….
1. A large percentage of hotel amenities are produced by Sysco and distributed to hotels under “trendy” sounding brands. The stuff is crap. And they have even been subjected to recalls in the past.
2. Le Labo and Aesop used to be wonderful. But the products are in a steady decline since L’oreal bought them both. They are shells of what they used to be in scent and objective.
I have the same attachment to Aesop toiletries, thanks to a stay at Hotel-Hotel in Canberra years ago. The scents are transporting! Also love COMO’s scented shampoo in their proprietary COMO Shambala fragrance.
Has anyone found Byredo Bal d’Afrique at one of these discount places?
People sell travel size toiletries from first class flights, in the pouches, on eBay. Some are quite nice. I have many uses at home and when traveling for the pouches.
There are at least several websites that sell upscale mini size toiletries, particularly soap bars (and primarily for men)–but they can be surprisingly expensive, $10 and up, each, and sometimes you can’t buy just one.