Westin Detroit Airport Took Away Free Bottled Water, Left An Empty Carafe — Cost Cutting Is Now Called ‘Sustainability’

The Westin Detroit Airport appears to have replaced the complimentary bottled water it used to leave in rooms with an empty glass carafe and a placard telling guests to refill it at water stations on each floor.

• They’re making an environmental pitch
  
• To make a worse guest experience palatable
  
• In the name of cost-cutting

Here’s a review on TripAdvisor noting this:

The complimentary bottle of water they used to leave in the room is gone.

Are you kidding me?

Instead, they now leave a glass carafe so you can fill it with tap water, which frankly tastes terrible. I’m guessing that carafe probably cost the hotel $10 (and likely disappears or get broken often), while the bottle of water they eliminated probably cost them pennies.

It just feels cheap — and that’s not a great look for a hotel charging $500 a night.

This is the modern U.S. hotel industry in a single image: remove something cheap – at premium room rates, the cost of a bottle of water is trivial – then make the guest do more work, and tell you that you’re morally inadequate if you complain.

And it’s especially bad at an airport hotel, where people arrive late, dehydrated, and exhausted. In-room water is basic hospitality.

And the hallway water station is not equivalent. A sealed bottle is convenient, predictable, and likely sanitary. A reused glass carafe is probably not. Maybe it was cleaned thoroughly?

I’ll be blunt. That carafe is not actually being cleaned between stays. At best, you do not actually know. Hotels are asking customers to trust cleaning standards, and I bet you’ll find plenty of other areas in the room that were missed (at best). I don’t use in-room coffee makers for the same reason.

The sign says “Fill it Forward” and “Proudly B Corp Certified.” If you see this as a friction or a downgrade, the problem is your values. Yet if the goal was actually to reduce plastic not to cut costs, there are plenty of things they’d be doing instead:

• boxed water
  
• canned water
• sealed glass bottles
  
• one complimentary bottle in the room plus refill stations for anyone who wants them. (And a log showing sanitization and maintenance on those machines.)

I’ve been to several hotels that want to eschew bottled water but not actually view it as a cut, like the Andaz Maui and the Seabird where they’ve given new bottles to use and to take with you.

This is not about water. It is about hotels monetizing brand equity built over decades, that the big chains now allow to be squandered for a quick revenue boost. As Marriott’s CEO put it, ‘they’ll put net rooms growth on my tombstone.’ The problem is, when the brand no longer stands for quality and predictability, guests no longer go to the website to book properties carrying its flag. And then they have nothing left to sell to the very properties they’re so desperate to sign on that they refuse to enforce quality standards.

Hotels raise rates while stripping away costs – whether it’s water, housekeeping, or alarm clocks by the bedside. There are things that used to distinguish a full service stay from something cheaper, like robes, slippers, bar soap, laundry bags, and room service. Each cut is small, but together eliminate the differentiation from select service properties or Airbnb.

Guests don’t remember the card beside the bed telling you not to have housekeeping change the sheets, the one in the bathroom telling you to reuse your towels the next day, or the commitment not to giveyou a bottle of water. They remember paying premium rates and learning that even the bottle of water has been turned into a hallway errand, with more germs along the way than the monkey in Outbreak.