Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Why I’m fed up with free hotel minibars

Links on Head for Points may support the site by paying a commission.  See here for all partner links.

‘Free’ minibars have become a selling point at certain hotel brands. Examples include Hyatt’s Andaz and IHG’s Hotel Indigo.

Why? Well, apart from reducing the effort required to ensure minibars are fully stocked and accounted for, the real reason is that it is very hard to tell the difference between most upscale hotel brands these days.

An easy way to differentiate your brand is with a benefit such as a free minibar. It’s a feature you can roll-out brand-wide very easily and it’s easy for the customer to understand.

I’m sick of them, though.

Free hotel minibar

Take a look at the photo above.

I am typing this in a luxury hotel room in Oman which, with taxes and service, will come to over £750 per night.

One of the ‘benefits’ of this resort is a free minibar.

Let’s take a look inside and see what I get for my £750 per night. Hmm ….

  • two cans of regular full sugar Coke
  • two cans of regular full sugar Sprite
  • four capsules of milk for the coffee machine

That’s it. Bizarrely, the room comes with a full set of wine glasses even though no wine is available.

It’s a joke. It’s actually a dis-benefit to me:

  • I’ve no interest in full sugar soft drinks
  • at this particular resort, I am a decent walk away from the main building where all of the F&B options are – to get anything else is a real drag
  • I am in a room with a lovely balcony and a great view – yet there’s nothing I want to drink whilst sat out there
  • there are no light snacks for me or the children, which would be handy as we are basically eating the huge free breakfast, one additional meal and then snacking our way through the rest of the day

What should a hotel minibar look like?

I think the last time I wrote about minibars was when I reviewed Virgin Hotels Edinburgh earlier this year.

This is what I wrote at the time:

I should mention the minibar, including a Smeg fridge. The hotel has clearly paid someone heavily to ‘curate’ a minibar experience. To some extent it doesn’t even matter what it contained – all you need to know is that the items on display were all achingly cool food and drink brands.

minibar Virgin Hotels Edinburgh

Open the fridge and there was – amongst many other items – a can of Tennents lager (ok, not exactly ‘cool’) with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot sitting next to a bottle of Irn-Bru.

Even the coffee was cool, coming in posh coffee bags. Only the cartons of UHT milk spoiled the look. Two free Tunnock’s Caramel bars were provided to accompany your tea or coffee.

minibar Virgin Hotels Edinburgh

I know this all sounds a bit silly but someone had probably spent weeks putting all these brands together. The fact that I didn’t touch any of the paid stuff was immaterial.

If you look at what Virgin Hotels Edinburgh offered, none of it was free – except the Caramel bar – but it sent a real signal about the hotel and its sense of style. For someone who was keen to tuck in, there was a lot to go for.

Compare the images above to the empty fridge at the top of the page. When you’re paying £750 per night, you should expect – if the minibar is free – to have a range of options as wide as any paid-for minibar, at least on the soft drinks side. (I accept that as we’re in the Middle East I should not expect a fridge full of alcohol, free or not, and neither do I need it.)

It should also be painfully clear that someone paying £750 per night can afford items from a hotel minibar, and may even be prepared to splash out on more upmarket or esoteric options.

Frankly, I’ve stayed at 3-star hotels with free minibars with a better selection than I have in my current resort. The free minibar isn’t a benefit to me – it is actually causing me inconvenience as I need to head over to the main building for anything I need and can’t buy basic snacks there at all. I think substantially less of the resort for offering it.

It’s sad that this specific hotel, which will get a full review soon, doesn’t have the imagination – it’s certainly not short of budget – to put something together that would really impress the guests.

If you have any recommendations for hotels with genuinely impressive free minibars, let us know in the comments.

Rant over!

PS. If you are not a regular Head for Points visitor, why not sign up for our FREE weekly or daily newsletters? They are full of the latest Avios, airline, hotel and credit card points news and will help you travel better. To join our 65,000 free subscribers, click the button below or visit this page of the site to find out more. Thank you.

best hotel loyalty promotions

Hotel offers update – April 2025:

Want to earn more hotel points?  Click here to see our complete list of promotions from the major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Want to buy hotel points?

  • Hilton Honors is offering a 100% bonus when you buy points by 29th May 2025. The annual purchase limit is also increased to 240,000 points pre-bonus. Click here to buy.
Category

General

Comments (179)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Mike says:
    29 Oct29 October 06:44

    Rob, holidays are highly personal. As someone who spends 100 nights a year in a hotel room, the very last place you’ll find me on my family holiday is in another hotel room! I choose a nice villa and my mini-bar is stocked with precisely what I (and the kids) want!

  • Phil says:
    29 Oct29 October 06:57

    Had a similar experience in Bahia Principe Tenerife. Mini bar had 2 cans of beer and 4 cans of sugary soft drinks. It was refilled once per day (if you were lucky). What really got me was that this was an all inclusive hotel – you could have whatever you wanted from the bar. It just created an inconvenience of having to go back and forth from room to bar after the kids were in bed

  • E says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:00

    Rob, if that’s the Al-Husn the minibar has become really disappointing. We stayed there about 5 years ago and the free minibar was better then. Lots of varied soft drinks (including sparking water and fruit juice), 2 different brands of beer, and several snack items such as crisps and nuts. There was also a free afternoon tea though, enabling us to skip lunch, so perhaps you are in one of the others. The Al-Husn is adults only so not sure if your kids are old enough yet.

    • P4D says:
      29 Oct29 October 11:47

      Yeh, we enjoyed Al-Husn 5 years ago. The minibar and afternoon were both very good!

  • PeterK says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:10

    The Pullman Hotel I stayed in this week had a fridge and it was switched on but it was completely empty. Even the two complimentary bottles of water hadn’t been placed in the cool fridge.

  • Paul says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:16

    I can only really speak of the Hilton brand, which I used pretty much exclusively between 2006 and 2018. Started out with half a bottle of wine per night (Southampton), a bottle per stay (Edinburgh), a bottle of Leffe (Antwerp, once Diamond). In more event years, Executive rooms in newly launched properties (Tower Bridge, Bankside) would feature free mini bar items for a while and then they would dwindle away to nothing.

    In the year before I retired (2017) I travelled to Amsterdam every week and stayed at the Hilton at the airport. As part of the Diamond benefits you could have four items from the mini bar for free, including the spirits.

  • TimM says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:20

    In my cheap (£40/night) 5-star ‘ultra all-inclusive’ Antalya hotels, I get 2 x Coca Cola, 2 x Fanta, 2 x Sprite, 2 x cherry juice (it is a Turkish thing), 2 x still water, 2 x sparkling water and 2 x beer. All are refreshed daily and if I ask, I will get the ‘lite’ (sugar-free) versions plus extra beer. That is just standard. If I want wine and snacks, I am afraid I have to venture to the 24 hour bar.

  • Paul T says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:33

    About a year ago I booked a room in Holiday Inn Cardiff City Centre (the one close to the castle grounds). I was delighted when , because of status, I received an email saying I would be upgraded for free to their room with a minibar. ‘Minibar’ was actually in the room title.
    The room was superior to what I booked, higher with a better view. But the minibar was empty! I mentioned it to reception who told me the minibars hadn’t been stocked at all since Covid! I had regularly stayed in Holiday Inn Brighton since Covid, which did stock their minibars. If I had chosen the ‘minibar’ room rather than being upgraded to it I would have been even more unimpressed.

  • AirMax says:
    29 Oct29 October 07:36

    I can’t help wondering whether those glasses were washed in the bathroom sink with any brush available, or in the dishwasher downstairs

    • NFH says:
      29 Oct29 October 07:46

      This really irritates me. I’ve never seen glasses on housekeeping’s trolleys in any hotel, which they would need if dirty glasses are to be changed for clean ones. They always wash glasses in the room, and probably dry them using the dirty towels that they’re changing for clean ones. There should be legislation requiring dirty glasses in hotel rooms to be changed, and never washed in a basin in the bathroom.

      • Novice says:
        29 Oct29 October 10:15

        Reason why I would never use any glass or cup in the hotel room ever. If there’s water bottles even the large ones I empty the top half to make sure the neck is clean and then chug it from bottle.

      • cin3 says:
        30 Oct30 October 10:42

        It’s a glass, who cares? Just rinse out any residue. This germophobia is utterly illogical.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

New to Head for Points?

Welcome!  We’re the UK’s most-read source of business travel, Avios, frequent flyer and hotel loyalty news. Let us improve how you travel. Got any questions? Ask them in our forums.

Get 25,000 Avios with the Barclaycard Avios Plus Mastercard

GET A SIGN-UP BONUS OF 18,000 VIRGIN POINTS!

Latest Forum Posts

Get 80,000 bonus points (worth 80,000 Avios) and £400 of dining credit with The Platinum Card (Offer ends 27th May)

Check reward flight availability instantly for free!

See a whole year of reward seat availability on one page at SeatSpy.com

Get up to 10,000 bonus Hilton Honors points

Booking a luxury hotel?

Our luxury hotel booking service offers you GUARANTEED extra benefits over booking direct. Works with Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, The Ritz Carlton, St Regis and more. We've booked £1.7 million of rooms to date. Click for details.

SME? GET THE ONLY FREE SMALL BUSINESS CREDIT CARD WHICH CAN EARN AVIOS

Get points worth 30,000 Avios with 'first year free' American Express Gold (ends 27th May)

The UK's biggest frequent flyer website uses cookies, which you can block via your browser settings. Continuing implies your consent to this policy. Our privacy policy is here.

Got it!