What’s Legal To Steal From Hotels? Now We Know
Stealing from hotel rooms is a very common occurrence, and lets face it, those little bottles of shampoo and soaps in hotel rooms always ‘magically’ find their way into our travel bags.
The Telegraph decided to ease all of our consciences and tell us what exactly is okay for us to stash into our bags before we check out of our hotel rooms.
David Elton, partner of Homegrown Hotels, a small hotel chain, said: “People will steal just about anything they can. Bathrobes, coat hangers, bed linen, mattress covers, towels, pillows, toilet-seat covers – pretty much everything in a room.
“With a small independent hotel there’s maybe more of a pang of conscience, but in bigger chain hotels people are less scrupulous.”
Now bed linen and mattress covers may be a bit much… but who is really going to miss those little shampoo bottles?
The Telegraph asked the question we all would like answered: “Just what, in the eyes of the law, can we get away with taking?”
According to MSN Now, the answer is “if it cannot be reused then it can be taken.”
So that means those little bottles of shampoo and the individually wrapped bars of soap are fair game.
Jacob Tomsky, author of the best-selling Heads in Beds, a memoir of ten years spent in the hotel industry had the following to say:
“Hotels have plenty of items, all cute and travel-sized, waiting in store rooms and all you have to do is pick up the phone and ask. We hope you take the amenities. We want you to use them later and think of us.”
And if that isn’t enough to put your conscience at ease, Tomsky continues on to say:
“Consider the unmanned housekeeper’s trolley a smash and grab situation. Pack your bags full of almond butter hand cream and guava face soap with espresso crisps.
Take three of everything and get the hell out of the hallway. Even if you do get caught, just say you were out of shampoo, or, even better, out of toilet paper, and thought you’d save them the trouble by grabbing it for yourself.
“Think of it this way: these amenities are here for you, they are yours. We are in no position to dispute the claim that when you wash your hair you prefer to dump fifteen bottles of lavender and poppy seed shampoo all over your scalp like some gooey shower freak.”
Items such as towels, bed linen, bathrobes, and what not are not on the approved list of things you can take.
Even though some of these things may be left on that housekeeper’s cart or extras left in the closet, that doesn’t mean they are fair game. They fall under that “reusable” category.
So now we all know what is acceptable to steal from hotel rooms! But that doesn’t mean go to your closest hotel and go crazy! But we can all now look in our travel bags at our toiletry stash with a cleaner conscience.
