Do You Use Wall-mounted Soap Dispensers in Hotels? Should You?

by Robert McGarvey

I was looking at the trio of wall-mounted dispensers in my hotel’s shower – truth is I was trying to decipher which was body soap but the typeface was too small and eventually I conceded and went out to the bedroom to retrieve my reading glasses.  

And then a memory popped up.  I recalled a conversation I had with a onetime client, maybe 15 years ago, and he was telling me his company, which managed dozens of hotels, reaped a huge advantage against stand alone properties because of its bulk buying of staples such as soaps, toilet paper, coffee, towels, the stuff hotels use in mass quantities.

Nothing special in that and then he said something that really caught my attention: “Of course I don’t use the in-room soaps. I bring my own.”

This was after TSA had decreed we travel only with miniature bottles and therefore he carefully poured his preferred shampoo, conditioner, body soap into little bottles before a trip.

Turns out he may have known something important long before I tumbled to it.

It was about that same time when big hotel groups began the phase out of individual mini bars of soap and tiny bottles of shampoo.  I remember them telling me this was good for the environment. Don’t forget they said that.

They didn’t say this but the shift to giant bottles could also save a few pennies of a housekeeper’s time because those big dispensers need less attention.

By about five years ago, the transition was over. Big jugs had won.  

That victory became all the plainer in 2019 when California passed a law prohibiting big hotels from using little toiletry bottles.  The flashpoint was a desire to decrease plastic waste, so out went single use tiny bottles.

Should you in fact use the big bottles in the shower?

Maybe not.

The hotel managers leading the conversion didn’t say those big jugs can spawn all manner of nastiness, which a onetime hotel manager took to TikTok to warn about.  She said she had seen bodily fluids in refillable shampoo and conditioner bottles and advised never to use them.

She added: “I’ve seen Nair and god knows what else in there.”

This should come as no real surprise.  One reason the capsule coffee machines have become standard issue in hotel rooms is that too many of us were using old fashioned Mr Coffee type carafes to make ramen, wash underwear, and who knows what else.  Personally I won’t use those carafes that still show up in some hotels even tho I am a big coffee drinker and I have developed a real fondness for hotels with giant coffee urns in the lobby.

If guests can use coffee makers to clean their socks, why wouldn’t I expect some would use in-room bulk toiletry dispensers for mischievous purposes?

Hotels aren’t ignorant about such worries. Many now boast that they use “tamper proof” containers and probably that will become the norm, just as tamper proof bottles rule the racks in our drug stores.

But removing that worry doesn’t necessarily deliver the win for the big containers.

That’s because there’s also an environmental argument against those bulk dispensers. Remember, this shift was purportedly fueled by environmental concerns of big hotel operators. That may be utter malarkey however. Per the Washington Post, “the greenest option is an old-school bar of soap made from plant oil or animal fat and lye, without many extra ingredients. Simple bar soap cuts greenhouse emissions by about a third compared with liquid soap, according to a study from the Institute of Environmental Engineering at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.”

Perhaps more curiously, research shows that many of us use more of the stuff that’s in those big bottles than we do with smaller bottles.  “Most of the studies show that people believe the product is less efficacious, meaning it doesn’t work as well, when they share it with strangers rather than friends,” UC Riverside marketing professor Thomas Kramer said. “Then, in some studies, it shows that it actually leads to them using more to make up for that perceived low efficacy.”

It’s in a big bottle and so we think it’s cheap (which probably it is) and, therefore, we use more of it to compensate for its inferiority. Multiply those greenhouse emissions.

Bottomline: my hotel executive/client was right. Bring your own toiletries. Ignore the giant dispenser on the shower walls and, whatever you do, don’t ever use an in-room coffee care except to wash underwear.