A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh.
Ah yes, the notorious hotel mini-bar. All those hilariously overpriced little bottles, chocolate bars, bags of nuts and chippies that you never, ever need and almost always have the strength to resist. Almost always. In
all honesty, I'm too much of a cheapskate to ever really run the risk of an outlandish mini-bar bill, but the times I've succumbed have all had one thing in common: I haven't been able to find the price list.
Twice in the past year I've been in hotels where the mini-bar price list was nowhere to be seen. Not buried in the fridge, not lying on the desk, not propped up between the Pringles; not a price list in sight. Feeling the surge of rebellion, recklessness and laziness that constitutes a decision to raid the mini-bar just so you don't have to leave the room, my mind was made up. I was going to have something from the mini-bar and the consequences be damned. Besides, I'd tricked myself into thinking, "how expensive can those peanuts really be?" Without a price list to jolt me back to reality, a bag of peanuts and a tiny bottle of vodka to take the edge off my highly stressful existence as a travel writer/radio host started to seem like a sensible use of my money.
Then check-out time arrived. "Anything from the mini-bar, sir?" That $3 supermarket bag of peanuts was $9, and the beverage the same size as those freebies on planes was $15.
$24 in total! Was that edge I'd needed taking off really worth $24 for 15 minutes of munching and sipping? That's $1.60 per minute of edge removal, and all because the hotel had hidden one of their mini-bar price lists. Instantly my edge returned.
