I’ve written about a lot of hotels cutting corners to save expenses and tacking on bogus fees, but I’ve never heard of a hotel not including soap in the room…until now.

This Hilton Hotel Says Soap Is Not Included With “Standard” Rooms

I remember the worst motel I ever stayed in was about 20 years ago, when I first started traveling on my own. I was studying 19th-century US history at UCLA and traveled to Nashville to visit The Hermitage, the home of US President Andrew Jackson. I wound up at a little motel near The Hermitage aptly called The Hermitage Inn…wow….it soon became clear why it was $40/night:

dirty towels, cigarette burns in the tub, ripped sheets…and no soap!

(the hotel is still open and you can stay there for $53 tonight!)

But ever since that, I cannot recall ever staying a hotel, motel, inn, or even hostel that did not have soap.

But View From The Wing shares a disturbing report about a Hilton hotel in Texas, specifically the Hampton Inn Dallas-Arlington Entertainment District, which does not provide soap to its “entry-level” guests.

Tonight I checked in a Hampton Inn, and realize there was no soap in the bathroom. I went to the front desk and asked for soap or body wash. The Front Desk stated that soap and body wash is not provided in their standard rooms.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this, anybody else come across this?

No soap? What are people supposed to do when they defecate, just use their left hand?

Ironically, the hotel website has photos of soap in the guest bathroom (though perhaps even more ironically, from the Hilton Garden Inn rather than the Hampton Inn), but it appears that you don’t get soap or body wash unless you pay to upgrade.

(The guest ultimately managed to score a bar of soap only after shaming the front desk into providing it)

This predicament exposes a problem in the US that only seems to be getting worse. Poor and untrained service as hotels try to reduce labor expenses and therefore cannot retain talented people is nothing new, but the degree to which chain hotels are trying to “have their cake and eat it too” just gets worse.

You would think a hotel that benefits so much from using the Hilton brand would at least meet the basic requirements of a Hilton hotel as part of the franchise agreement, and I’m sure that includes soap. Are we even having this discsussion?! It’s crazy.

Hilton (and Marriott and Hyatt) must step up and insist that their true customers–the hotels that license their brand–keep their end of the bargain in order to enjoy the benefits and steady stream of customers that comes from using the brand name. This should be non-negotiable…you fix it now or you will be de-listed.

And to this particular hotel, how petty and literally disgusting…

CONCLUSION

A Hampton Inn in the Dallas area thinks it does not have to provide guests with soap. That’s absurd, though I guess I will have to start placing a travel-size bar of soap in my toiletry bag…what a world.