Setting up a room for a night and then taking it down to make place for the next guest is difficult for hotels without producing a good amount of waste. Furthermore, guests are more likely than locals to require single-use, disposable things.
This could be the reason why a research conducted by the European Commission found that each guest produced an average of 2.2 pounds of waste per night. That amount exceeded 13 pounds for resort hotels.
In response, some hotels have developed ways to reduce the quantity of waste in their rooms. However, some of these cost-cutting and waste-cutting choices may leave guests confused, as a new TikTok video shows.
Felix Bazgan (@fbazgan), a TikTok user, claims to have found a new “cheap or money-saving way hotels are cutting back on different things” in his video. “Check this out. This is the hotel soap here at a Marriott,” he says.
He has a small bar of soap in his hands. The inside of it is made up of several holes rather than a single, solid block. He claims, “Instead of having a solid soap, they’ve got three holes … in the soap to take out the mass and the weight of it.” He observes and says, “Interesting.”
"Unused hotel soap" has actually been an issue for a while, even though it may not be something that many guests notice. When a hotel soap is opened, it cannot be reused by another guest, hence, it is often thrown away.
This inefficiency results in an immense amount of waste. Hotels have found a number of ways to solve this issue. Firstly, many hotels have started offering mounted containers of liquid soap.
Second, alternative soap bars, like the one in Bazgan's video, are now available in some hotel’s rooms. Travelers’ views on this choice vary from neutral to positive in online discussions, with many pointing out waste in the hotel industry.
Lastly, many hotels collaborate with companies who try to reuse used soap. According to TIME, hotels can hire Clean the World, an Orlando-based company, to collect used soap for a small amount.
The soap is then melted down and used to make new soap. The Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations worldwide can then receive this soap. Users didn’t seem to care if the hotel was just trying to cut costs in the comments section.
They see this as a necessary change in the hotel industry. One user commented, “Given that nearly all hotel soap is thrown away and isn’t actually ever used, this is brilliant.” Another commented, “This also dramatically cuts down on waste. They throw away so much soap.”
“Think about it from their point of view; Hardly anybody is going to be staying long enough for that to even matter, and the soap gets thrown out no matter what. So if they choose to save some money, it’s not actually going to matter except for the rare occasion,” explained a third commenter. “Those savings usually go to amenities, like free wifi or the pool being open 24/7, for example.”
