I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those travelers who have ended up paying a lot of attention to the toiletries provided to guests by hotels.
Well, not the standard or even mediocre products found in low-end hotels, but to mention only the Bulgari products found at Grosvenor House in Dubaithe Bliss found at all W hotels or the Remède at St Régis.…some of them are really nice, even if it makes me want to order them for my home.
Toiletries: a marketing tool
Let’s not kid ourselves, these products have a dual purpose for hotels. Of course they allow to give consistency to the positioning of a hotel and the more a hotel will have a premium positioning, the more it will need a high-end product in accordance with its DNA. But it is also a basic marketing tool: when the customer takes these products home and uses them, it reminds him of the hotel or chain in question and subconsciously can influence his next reservation. That’s exactly what a Starwood marketing person said in an article I read several years ago.
Too bad for the collectors this blessed era will soon come to an end and it will be necessary from now on to order the products rather than to fill conscientiously your suitcase every day while waiting for the cleaning lady to replace them.
Going green at Marriott
Marriott, the world’s leading hotel group with more than 7,000 hotels to date, has decided to eliminate all individually wrapped products and replace them with pump dispensers by December 2020.
At the group level, 500 million small plastic bottles will be avoided, or 700 tons of plastic.
In addition, the big dispensers are recyclable unlike the small bottles.
In doing so, Marriott is following the lead of IHG, which launched a similar initiative last year
A bit of green washing?
We can only be pleased to see such initiatives multiplying from an environmental point of view, even if some questions remain unanswered.
In terms of user experience first. Having been confronted with this in chains with similar practices, it is not always very practical when you have to turn the pump 20 times to get enough shower gel! A not so trivial point.
Then, on the contrary, if Marriott tells us that contrary to the bottles there the customer will not be limited in quantity one can ask the question of the overconsumption of products, the impact of their production and their reprocessing with waste water etc.
And finally we can’t avoid thinking about a nice green washing operation because buying the products in bulk to fill the dispensers will cost infinitely less than buying millions of small bottles. But not sure that the cleaning ladies will appreciate this extra work.
What changes for suppliers?
I was wondering how long it will take for suppliers to adapt because I’m not sure that all of them have adapted offers in stock.
Then if I do not doubt that hotels benefit from consequent volume discounts, the interest for the supplier is, beyond the volume, the exposure of the product and the fact that the customers bring them back home to, finally, want to buy them personally. In this case, we can bet that the exposure will be much lower and that it will be an element that will be taken into account during the commercial negotiations.
But as they say, future is priceless!
