Hotels Part Five: Freebies and Fun

You know it’s a special moment when the man in the family notices the soap in the hotel.   Guys don’t care about soap, or how it smells.    Except for Irish Spring.   Guys are allowed to extol that one because it’s a “man’s soap.”

So at risk to my masculinity, I have to say that at a stop a few years back at LaQuinta (I think) I couldn’t help but notice the soap was  a little nicer than what one normally receives.    As luck would have it, there was a manufacturer credit given to Dial Soap.   A quick call or e-mail and I would have this product in our home; or at least know where to purchase.

It was not to be.   The product they give out in hotels is manufactured entirely for the hospitality industry.   There is no corresponding product sold at retail.

Okay.   Let’s think about this.   You’ve got an opportunity to place a product sample in every hotel room.   You’ve got tourists — people with much disposable income — who are indeed going to use your product, and use it at a time where every vacation memory will be indellibly etched in memory.   And — this is the really big one — the hotel chain is willing to pay you to give out that product sample.

And then, you fumble the ball badly by not having that product, or anything like it, available through the retail system.    I couldn’t believe it.

But then I got thinking.  If the Dial Soap people don’t want to it right, perhaps there are other manufacturers — not necessarily just of health and beauty aid products — who would be willing to place product samples in hotel rooms.

What if each chain had a different “gift basket” and you knew when you checked in that it was waiting for you (so local operators and housekeepers couldn’t skim off the samples for their families) and these were relatively the same across each chain, with a few regional disparities to make it interesting?

What if some of the money spent on advertising and some of the product samples that already exist were diverted to the hotel/motel industry and its customers?   What if the products in a single-bed room were different than the products in a double room or suite that rents to families?

Best of all, what if it worked?   What if instead of paying for supplies, hotels and motels found that companies were so willing to get what the entertainment industry calls “product placement,” that they were willing to pay them a small fee to see that a “travel basket” contained their products?   And — dare I dream this — the hotels and motels passed some of the savings on to the weary traveler?

Besides, the freebies would make travel a lot more fun.    I should want to return that hotel the next time around.

Pictured:  One of dozens of personal collections of hotel soap photographed and posted to the internet.   Okay…  Personally I use the soap; I have enough collections of other things.    This one is a classic, though.