Today I was proofreading a booklet for a fancy hotel that be get given out to guests.
The booklet had normal things, like how to use the phone, and the room service menu, and so on. And then on the last page it had the costs of everything a person could buy for/from their room, like the soap dish, slippers, etc.
I assumed it had that all in there mostly so people would know how much it cost if they happened to walk off with the soap dish… but at the bottom of the page it said you could buy the full bedding set for a ‘value’ price - including the mattress and bed coverings…
Huh? Why would someone buy most of a bed from a hotel? Especially when it would cost them $1500 - $2000 CDN.
I read a newspaper article about this recently. IIRC, some hotels are stepping way up in the quality/luxuriousness in their beds and bedding. Offering their bedding for sale is a kind of marketing gimmick, I guess. After all, some hotels sell a crapload of bathrobes. Maybe people will want to buy the bedding, but I have a hard time picturing it.
I have heard of people liking the matress at a hotel so much that they wanted to get one for home. Or maybe that was a hotel commercial saying how good their matresses are.
We stayed at a hotel in Seattle that had the temperpedic or a similar mattress. We liked it so much we bought one. Not from the hotel directly but from a mattress store. I can definitely see people wanting to get a comfortable bed. It is a pretty bad mattress that is uncomfortable for the few minutes you lay on it in the store.
I doubt they sell you the actual bed from the room you stayed in. Most places where you can purchase the robes will let you have a brand new one vs. taking the one in the hotel closet.
I believe this may have started with the Westin Hotels “Heavenly Bed” program, where they upgraded the mattress, bedsheets and blankets in their guest rooms. And other hotel chains have since upgraded their guest rooms. Apparently, some people so like the bedding that they wanted to buy the bed for their homes. This article from 2003 says that they were selling $100,000 worth of the bedding a month, although I don’t know if the sales have gone up or down since then.
Well, I’ll be jiggered! I would never have thought that there would be such a demand for hotel beds! Maybe the hotels I stay in have beds with a little too much ‘character’.
I liked my “Heavenly Bed” at the Westin in Cincinnati although I did find the price tag a bit much. But I often wonder if I sleep so soundly because I have to take phenobarbital for epilepsy, so I tend to sleep soundly.
But the bed was really comfortable and the bedding was nice also.
I tried to buy a shower head from a hotel once. Before you could buy a Speakman Anystream on the open market, I stayed at a hotel with one. They wouldn’t sell it to me but they did direct me to their plumbing supply house so I could buy my own!
The first I heard of this was in the early planning stages of Le Reve in Las Vegas, now known as Wynn Las Vegas. Wynn said that at his old company (Mirage) people were constantly asking the staff about all kinds of things in the rooms – toilets, shower nozzles (as above), beds, vases, everything. So he was gonna publish a book and stick a price on everything in the room. Looks like he got beat to the punch, or he lifted the idea from somone else who was planning it. At any rate, when it opens he’ll actually have some products which he thinks might be good sellers but which he might not have picked otherwise. Flat-screen HDTVs are one example.
I can see why people might want to buy the beds - I never sleep as soundly as when I’m in a hotel and I’ve never found a bed in a store half as comfortable as most decent hotels have.
Maybe that’s the bed in which they consummated their marriage? Conceived their first child? Were cuckolded by their spouse and need the genetic evidence for a bigger settlement?
Maybe the intended message is not so much “Everybody wants to buy our beds!”, but rather “Here’s how much it will cost you if you damage one”? At least, that was my first thought, but perhaps that’s why I don’t stay in that class of hotel
My first thought on this is that it has nothing or little to do with people who are actually interested in “buying” used bedding and other stuff from the hotel room. It’s a way for the hotel to say, “If things are missing from the room after you leave, this is how much we’re going to charge to your credit card.”
I’d buy this if it were a lower-end hotel/motel. I doubt that this is the reasoning behind a higher class hotel using this practice.
I also agree with a previous poster in that they likely wouldn’t sell you “used bedding” but rather giving you the option to purchase the same bedding new.
