I have seen a number of trip reports where people who fly into a city buy a styrofoam cooler from a nearby drugstore and pack it with hotel ice rather than pay for a hotel mini-fridge (or even use it along with the mini-fridge as it is a de facto freezer with a much larger freezer capacity).
What I want to know is, what do you do with the cooler when you leave - and if you just leave it in the hotel room, what does the hotel do with it?
I don’t see people taking it home with them, as they are almost always too big for carry-on, and it would be much cheaper to buy a new one after you land than to pay the baggage fee to take it with you as checked baggage.
As for the hotel, I wonder if any keep them somewhere, then make them available for a fee - or even as part of the hotel’s unannounced “resort fee” (like the ones pretty much every hotel in Las Vegas charges; I am under the impression that the main reason they do this is, they don’t have to advertise the higher rates on sites like Orbitz or Travelocity, which apparently get some sort of cut).
There is a Walmart across the street from the Ballpark at Arlington. They sell a cooler with a rigid insert that neatly fits under the seats at the ballpark for $5. The Rangers’ policy is outside food and drink are allowed as long as it fits under your seat. No glass no alcohol. We usually fly in, buy a cooler and sodas and water. Sometimes some fruit (ice cold cherries are surprisingly good when it’s blazing hot). Ballpark hotdogs adn nachos and stuff like that are part of the fun. Paying $6 for a coke is not. So four of us have drinks in there. After the last game we’re going to see, we give it to some kid if they’re interested or when we get back to the hotel, we pass it on to someone else checking in.
When my kids were little, we used to take a winter beach trip to Florida most years. Rather than haul the endless parade of items required to entertain two small boys for a week, we’d swing by a Walmart as soon as we arrived, pick up some beach toys, a cooler, maybe a few cheap extra clothes and towels, etc.
After the vacation was over, we’d clean everything up (hit the landromat with the clothes) and drop everything off at a Goodwill or other donation center before we headed to the airport to fly home.
We have a soft-sided cooler that packs easily into a suitcase. It doesn’t work as well as a hard-sided one, but is still handy (and we often use it for grocery shopping in hot weather or when we don’t want to rush home with perishables, for that matter).
I can’t imagine people would be buying styrofoam coolers if they weren’t meaning to leave them at the hotel. Otherwise you buy a durable cooler and tote it back and forth.
And I can’t imagine the hotel doing anything but throwing them away.
A friend of my parents would claim that she needed a refrigerator for medicines, so even if that hotel didn’t have refrigerators in the rooms, they’d bring one to hers. But I’ve found that refrigerators are almost standard in hotel rooms now.
Actually, neither have I - if there’s a refrigerator already in the room. A lot of hotels don’t have mini-fridges in every room (mini-bar fridges notwithstanding), but will rent one to you for a daily fee.
The one Red Room I use regular has a couple of these left behind every month; why they are left is a mystery since its nowhere near an airport. Why they are used makes some sense; the rooms don’t have any refrigerators and vending is a little steep - and a market is just down the road. What housekeeping does is leave it in “lost and found” for a month and then recycle it to a couple local fishermen they know.
We used to do this, not because we didn’t have a refrigerator at the hotel, but rather to have a way to keep our picnic food and drinks during our day trips around the area. We’d either leave it in the rental car or with whatever family member or friend we were visiting at the time.
Like stillowned did, we’d do laundry if we could at the end of the trip, either at the hotel or the relative’s house. It’s nice not to be dragging around stinky dirty clothes, especially when we were at a beach. I really like the idea of donating slightly used beach gear to Goodwill - that might be a good place to pick up stuff too.
I don’t know how many beach destinations have a rental place like this, but when we’ve been to Anna Maria Island over the past several years, we’ve rented a basket of beach toys for the week from this place. (We could’ve rented coolers, umbrellas, and stuff as well, but since the deck of the house we rent was literally <20 feet from the water, we didn’t need all of that. A $20 basket of buckets, shovels, and other toys suitable for playing with in the sand, and we were set.)
If you’re doing a beach rental, it doesn’t hurt to ask the rental place if there’s someplace down there that rents beach equipment, toys, bicycles, boogie boards, etc.
Are they? That would be a welcome change. It’s been a few years since we stayed in a hotel room, but back in the previous decade or so when we did so more often, we’d noticed an evolution where, first, mini-fridges in rooms became common, then they got replaced by even smaller fridges that were completely filled with the mini-bar beverages, so there was no room for any of your own stuff.
And of course they’d charge you for anything that was absent from the mini-bar when housekeeping came through during the day, so you couldn’t even take their stuff out, set it aside, and put your own stuff in.
If they’ve gone back to providing in-room refrigerators as a matter of course (instead of or in addition to the mini-bar fridge, either way is OK), that would be progress.
Oh, they’ve solved that problem. Now minibars are electronic and they charge you on the spot, so you don’t even consider it. Some places even charge extra if you’re caught refrigerating unapproved merchandise with their minibar.
In my experience, refrigerators you can use for your own stuff are one of those amenities, like free wifi, that become less common as the price of the room increases past a certain point.