Entering a new hotel room, leaving your bags, admiring the views and going to the bathroom to wash your hands with one of the little soaps waiting by the sink. Some of the small rituals associated with going on a trip have been changing with the times, and others remain. Concern for the environment, for example, is beginning to displace individual containers of gel and shampoo in many places to replace them with larger dispensers They use less plastic.
But the bars of soap are still there, unchangeable, despite all the other steps towards sustainability which are becoming more widespread. Neither the bottles of hand gel nor the dispensers seem to have managed to overshadow the eternal miniature soap, but why is this happening?
According to what he tells us operations staff of several hotels, the bar of soap it's one of those things that only seen in hotels , a detail that makes customers feel special. “What can a room offer that not just any guest in their house does?” asks Anton Moore, general manager of the Gansevoort in New York. “Arriving and finding an individual wrapper with a bar of soap in the bathroom is one of those things that still reaches people. It makes the difference between being in a luxury hotel or not”.
Maison de la Luz hotel room, New Orleans
“We always choose based on what allows us to deliver an exceptional experience,” explains Teach Mayer, director of the Marram of Montauk. “There are few things as intimate and personal as grooming time. For many people, bars of soap in hotels are a exclusivity sign”.
The sales director of Maison de la Luz, on the other hand, believes that bars of soap, rather than reminding us that we are in a hotel experiencing a special moment, make us feel at home . "At Maison we seek to create a home," explains Peter Honan. “We have big bottles that we clean and refill, and they make sense in the shower and near the bathtub. But there are places, like the sink, where the dispensers break the aesthetics of the room”.
The bar of soap also provides a fantastic opportunity to include company logo or of add details to bathroom design . Honan explains that at Maison de Luz, there are oyster-shaped soap dishes designed by a New Orleans artist. “It is an aesthetic element more. We want the Maison to not be just any place, that doesn't give the feeling of being anywhere in the world. Our intention is for guests to feel like they are in New Orleans."
The company that makes the grooming products can also be an attraction of its own. In the Marram, the aromatic products are from Le Labo, because, as Mayer tells us, the Santal woody fragrance 33 It is perfect to combine with the cedar handcrafted finishes of the buildings. In addition, the color combination of its packaging matches the rooms.
Large bottles of gel and shampoo are already quite accepted in hotels, and are even considered a sign of the company environmental policy and its commitment to sustainability. But if there are too many dispensers in a bathroom, the experience can feel a bit like going to the gym. “A room for eight hundred euros a night is not a place where nobody wants to see seven dispensers on the wall,” explains Justin Nels, regional director of the Isla Bella Beach Resort. This hotel usually leaves three bottles in the shower and another three near the bathtubs but, according to the responses of the clientele to their surveys, most prefer that there is also bar soap.
Many people have another question related to the issue of bars of soap in hotels: would it be possible collect the remains of used soaps and remelt them to create new bars ? It sounds complicated and certainly the hotel managers we spoke to couldn't think of any way this could be possible. To begin with, to recycle soap , they would have to have adequate facilities for this in the building itself. Nor could they think of methods to do this hygienically and safely, unless they were within their reach.
The bars of soap are still there.
However, there are those who have found a way to make these soaps useful. The Clean the World Foundation collects and recycles discarded soaps from hotels associated with its program in exchange for a fixed annual fee. Among the hotels with which it collaborates are those of Hilton, InterContinental, Hyatt and Marriott.
In any case, keeping individual soaps is not a general decision either and, although there are clients who love it, several hotel chains have chosen to dispense with them . Conrad Hotels & Resorts, for example, is eliminating their use for the same environmental reasons that have already led to the demise of miniature plastic bottles. They recently started a collaboration with Byredo to offer bulk bath products, such as liquid hand soap in dispensers by the sink instead of individual bars. “It's a much greener option that makes us feel better about what we do,” explains Nils Arne-Schroeder, global brand director for Conrad Hotels & Resorts. He also thinks that the great shift towards sustainability that the sector was about to experience has seen frustrated by the pandemic , which has forced an increase in the use of disposable individual containers.
Opinions about how long it will take for the little soaps to disappear completely are very divided. Justin Nels continues to think that customer experience comes first or: “Until our guests let us know that they prefer not to use them, or until they stop using them, my job will continue to be that they are there. We want the room to have everything they need and to convey comfort and safety”. Mayer points out that, much like the increasingly common practice of not changing sheets every day, many hotels have stopped changing soaps daily in order to reduce waste . If you pay attention, you can learn a lot about the principles of a hotel observing how they treat their grooming products.