All right folks, this is a question for Dopers with travel experience. I’m going to be staying in a hotel for a few days during an upcoming vacation. I plan to spend at least one of those days at a nearby beach. Is it ok to bring a hotel towel with me to the beach, or do I need to bring my own beach towel with me from home? According to TripAdvisor, it’s a four-star hotel, if that matters.
If the beach is affiliated with the hotel, they will have towels there for their guests. If you are just going to a nearby beach, it depends what you mean by “Is it OK”. The hotel would certainly not want you to do it, so in that sense it is not OK, but they would probably not notice if you did. The bigger issue (to me) is that even at nice hotels, the towels are not the type that you really want at the beach. They are too small and too thin to make decent beach towels. I would just bring my own.
You generally aren’t supposed to take room towels out of the room. For instance, if a hotel has a pool, they generally supply separate towels for pool use. If a hotel has any sort of access to a beach, they provide beach towels as well.
Sometimes, the hotels already have a couple of beach towels for your use in the room, at the foot of the bed or wherever.
If the hotel is just ‘nearby’ a beach, I would just give them a quick call before I packed something as bulky as a beach towel.
Concurring with the previous posters. Nicer hotels will generally have separate towels available for pool / beach usage, and will prefer that you use those.
Totally agreed with this. If they’re near a beach, it’s almost undoubtedly an issue that they deal with regularly, and they’ll be able to easily answer your question.
n/m
You thought this thread was about the butt-floss thing, too?
Thank you all for the good advice! I’ll try to give them a call.
No but now that you mention it :smack:
I would ask. Most places I’ve been would consider it bad form and for an extended stay down Virginia Beach I picked up a real cheapie and abandoned it. But I must admit to having done it now and then. One Red Roof I know near a swimming area/park keeps some older towels dyed slightly to hand out for things like that; you would never know though unless you asked.
I vacation a lot at nicer oceanfront resorts. I’ve never once packed my own beach towels. Most nicer hotels have beach huts (usually near the main pool), which do nothing but process beach towels. They usually implement a “beach towel card” system, which works like this:
Each registered guest is issued a card upon check-in, which is to be exchanged at the beach towel hut for their 2 issued towels. After that, you simply exchange a dirty towel for a clean towel on a 1:1 basis, until check-out day, when you’re (in theory) supposed to exchange the last set of towels for a towel card, which you then produce at check-out or risk being charged for the cost of the towels.
In reality, it’s an imperfect system that only keeps honest people honest. The hut attendants often don’t demand a card or a used towel before handing out clean towels, they rarely track whether you’re exchanging them on a 1:1 basis, there’s no way of them knowing if it’s your towel vs. one you grabbed from an abandoned chair, and the cards are never tracked at check-out. (And, besides, who goes through a formal check-out process anymore?)
During your stay, you’re free to take the towels off property. They just want you to return them at the end of the week.
P.S. Each resort has its own unique towel design (e.g. Westin has an sky blue stripe). Off property, they’re actually great conversation starters: “Oh, I see you’re staying at the Westin, too.”