I’ve seen some of those fountains that were leased from either Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola and they have a sticker on the side with the dates they were sanitized by the lessor.
For a one-day trip, a well insulated cooler bag, packed with your food, plus a couple of reusable freezer blocks (frozen overnight) should keep food cool and fresh all day if you keep it out of the sun.
Another thing to consider is that certain foods will stand better than others; a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich will become unsafe in a shorter time than cheese and salami.
I have traveled extensively, including a month-long road trip last summer, and almost every inexpensive motel had a fridge and microwave as a standard room amenity.
Why not get a cooler and just buy ice as you visit gas stations each day? That’s probably a whole lot easier than dealing with a mini-fridge every night, and it’ll keep your food cold all day (closer to two in truth). It’s what we did when we did our Great Central US Tour a few years back (Texas to S. Dakota and back via OK, KS, NE, WY, CO and NM).
But yeah, I haven’t been in a hotel without a mini fridge or a complimentary breakfast that I can remember.
One way to keep things cool for long periods is to use dry ice rather than regular ice. It will keep things very cold or frozen for very long periods of time and you don’t have any water to deal with as it melts. It does release CO2, so just make sure you have some ventilation. But in a good cooler, dry ice can last several days and keep stuff frozen solid. Many grocery stores carry it. And you can always revert to ice if you can’t find dry ice.
One thing that might save money is to bring a hotplate or something. I’ve noticed that fridges are more common in rooms compared to microwaves. Bringing a hotplate and pan will allow you to heat up and cook food. I would recommend an induction hotplate so you don’t have to worry about hotplate actually being hot from residual heat when you pack up. Just looking around on Amazon, I see this interesting alternative to a hotplate. Might work for travel to heat and cook food:
Quite often, there isn’t great food shopping around hotels, so do a stop at a grocery store on your way to the hotel. You’ll have better prices and selections compared to mini-marts that might be near the hotel.
The OP clarified (in the post directly above yours) that the choice was between different hotels, not different options offered by the same hotel.
This matches my experience. But I can believe that there are still hotels/motels out there somewhere that don’t (perhaps an independent, “mom and pop” motel instead of a chain).
But I also wonder if maybe the cheaper option that the OP mentioned simply didn’t advertise that they had mini-fridges and microwaves, and the OP’s wife just assumed this meant they didn’t have them.
Breakfast is somewhat rarer. Most do include it, but a lot (Marriott is one example) do not. Luckily, breakfast is somewhat easy to manage without a kitchen, especially if you don’t insist on a cooked meal. Fruit, granola bars, a peanut butter sandwich, etc. Even some lower-rent places have something, most of the time, though it’s fairly bad.
I’ve found that it’s mainly the lower-end chains (or Mom-and-Pops) that have them and the higher-end ones lack them. My guess is that the higher-end chains cater to business customers who will happily expense their more deluxe lodgings and better, seperately-paid-for dining options, whereas the lower-end ones rely on family travelers or passers-through who want as much as they can get for as little as they can pay.
That’s consistent with my experience, as well. Though Marriotts, even the ones that aren’t quite as high-end, pretty much never do (except their Fairfield Inns). The higher-end places also tend to have things like “resort fees”, and/or other bullcrap charges like 15 bucks a day for wi-fi (to be fair, that one was in 2010; it’s the only place I’ve ever been that had THAT, and nowaways “free” wi-fi is expected everywhere, kind of like bathrooms and TVs).
I’ve found the same thing- except I’ve also seen something sort of in the middle. There are places that do not have a refrigerator/microwave in every room but do have some refrigerators to rent , and the price is usually about $25/weekend. I say “weekend” because these really aren’t hotel/motels where you would stay for one night - they advertise themselves as “resorts” but they aren’t what people normally think of as a resort. They include meals and have some recreational facilities other than a pool ( like bocce courts or a baseball field) and I guess the idea is that since meals are included, most people won’t need a refrigerator.
The 12V DC powered cooler is IMHO the best bet:
- While driving, just keep it plugged in via car power (the cig. lighter socket)
- When in a hotel room, just carry it over from the car, then whip out your 120VAC / 12VDC adapter and plug it in there.
- Ice is troublesome: Heavy, meltwater needs to be removed often, and hotel ice might not be germ-free. So you have to go get fresh ice daily; an extra chore and expense.
If your cooler has enough stuff in it (your choice of milk, juices, other drinks, etc.) it should stay cool for a good while with its insulation, while transitioning between hotel and automobile powered states.
We used such a cooler when traveling by car and boat. Makes traveling a lot more comfy and convenient.
I’ve been travelling for work lately, and staying at Hilton Garden Inn or Hampton Inn (also a Hilton property). Both had refrigerators and microwave ovens in the room but only Hampton Inn had free breakfast. The Garden Inn had a $14.95 fixed price for breakfast, which seemed a lot. So instead I either ate at the work location or went to McDonalds. (Although going to McDonalds involved going six miles away on the Interstate, and then two Egg McMuffins and a beverage came to almost ten bucks, so perhaps I should have just eaten the hotel breakfast. I was expensing everything so there was no reason to be frugal.)
I’m involved with planning a conference, and back then the second thing we negotiated with the hotel was free wifi for our attendees. (The first was a kickback for the conference.) The guests of the high end hotel started getting quite irate at wifi charges on top of high room rates. Wifi is a lot more available for free than it used to be.
And this, I believe, is exactly why hotels that cater to business travelers charge extra for things that are free at cheaper hotels.
And with the price of gas these days, checking online for local gas prices might be able to save you a bit of money. Find a gas station a little out of the way that is a bit cheaper than the ones on the main road.
Yep.
Though the place that charged for wi-fi (and it was 15 bucks a day!!) was less of a conference / business place, than a vacation destination - it was in Phoenix, and had an on-site waterpark for guests. This was in 2010, before smartphones were really all that common.
We had our extended family all traveling, then staying at a “resort” hotel for a while. We were surprised that we never used the microwave, but we got a LOT of use out of the fridge and the coffeemaker.
We planned it out, and since there was no food store nearby, we stopped at a mega-supermarket on our way and loaded up on breakfast cereal, fruit, sandwich makings, and a lot of cheap beer (I cringed at that part of the plan, but Yuengling’s not bad).
Now, the days we were going to be gone for a day trip, we’d eat a big breakfast*, a lighter lunch, then a small but nice dinner. Even with the occasional nice restaurant (had to find a cheap-but-tasty Friday night Fish Fry!), our food budget was low.
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*BTW: If you’re going to go out for a meal, breakfast is the one! I’ve always searched out local diners where you can get huge platters of eggs, sausages, hashbrowns, grilled veggies, biscuits with homemade jam, etc etc, for ten to fifteen bucks. That’s with unlimited thirty-weight coffee.
We quickly discovered we could usually skip lunch… and some days only have room for a small supper.
RE: manifold destiny–MythBusters (I think) already tested that with Alton Brown
Really, just get a cooler. Much easier than a fridge that you’ll have to use a hand truck to move. Fill the cooler with ice, beer, soda, ham, chicken, cheese, and bread. Mustard if you want. You’ll never want for lunch if you have that, and of course, you can add other things as you like. And as has been described, ice is easy to get from most every motel.
I’ve got a cooler that has a built-in icebox. By that, I mean a container that is meant to be filled with water, and frozen. It has lasted me, with cold drinks and food, from central Alberta to Toronto. And it cost a lot less, in time and effort and expense, than toting a fridge around.
I stay in mostly mid-range hotels, and all of the ice machines I’ve encountered in the last couple of decades have been the “place the bucket under the spigot and press the button style” I haven’t seen one with an open ice bin to scoop ice out of in quite a while. I mainly think they switched because people were filling their 48 quart coolers to take on the next leg of their journey.