Many travelers in search of cheap airplane tickets and discount hotel rooms are also very environmentally conscious. In an effort to save money and be green select upscale hotels have started doing away with tiny bathroom bottles and small bars of soap, installing push button dispensers instead.
Experts estimate that half a million little shampoo, lotion, and other bathroom hotel bottles are dumped in landfills daily. Hotels claiming to be eco-friendly establishments can expect to start receiving complaints if they do not switch to soap dispensers. Amenity dispensers are predicted to be the standard within five years.
Hotels currently testing or installing bathroom amenity dispensers included Choice Hotels, Kimpton, Ritz Carlton, and Starwoods extended stay Element Hotels.
Typically only about 10 percent of a bar of hotel soap gets used. Some hotels have started distributing smaller bars or using bars with curves carved into the bars so that they look the same size as the old bars but have a third less soap.
Some hotels are now purchasing a line of environmentally friendly amenity products called Green from Natura. One of the products being sold is a bar of soap with a large hole in the middle which was designed to eliminate the unused center of traditional hotel soap bars.
Currently U.S. hotels throw out about 800 million bars of barely used soap each year.
In the future cost and environmentally conscious hotels are expected to install digital thermostats that will sense if a person is in the room and regulate the temperature accordingly.
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