Okay let me first start off by saying that this “hotel breakfast hack” that I’m about to talk about is not really a “hack”, in most senses of the word. We are not talking about eating hotel breakfast when you’re not staying there, or anything life changing. But it is something that I’ve done at literally every hotel breakfast I’ve been at for the past several years, and nobody has ever said anything to me about this. In fact, I still don’t understand why the breakfast attendant cared enough to even say anything.

REVEALED! My #1 Hotel Breakfast Hack

Okay, okay – like I said, this isn’t some amazing hotel breakfast hack – it’s just a way to get a little more juice or water from a hotel breakfast while minimizing the number of trips you have to take to refill.

Normally, when I stay at a hotel with breakfast, they have plastic cups near the water / juice machines. They look similar to this one, which I found on a hotel supply website

These cups are 7 ounces.

But if you walk a few feet, there are also coffee cups in or near the breakfast area, like this one, which are 12 ounces.

Nearly twice as big, meaning that you can drink twice as much (or alternatively, refill your drink half as often). Again, you don’t need to tell me this is not any sort of amazing breakfast hack – I KNOW. I suppose the real hack would be bringing your own water and water bottle?

Hotel Breakfast Attendant Shuts It Down!

Anyways, I was recently staying at the Holiday Inn Express American Fork, visiting my son, and I went down to the breakfast. I was by myself, since it was pretty early in the morning (2 hour time change) and my wife and son were still sleeping. The juice machine had a sign on it that I am not sure I’ve ever seen before

Seems a bit random, but perhaps this hotel has had problems with people filling up huge to-go containers / bottles with juice? In any case, I was just using a coffee cup, AND I wasn’t getting juice (I was getting water).

But the breakfast attendant called me out and said that I could not use the coffee cup – that I had to use the (smaller) plastic cups that were next to the juice machine. I (gently) pushed back a bit saying that I had never heard of this and asking if this was some sort of new rule. She said that it was “an IHG brand standard” which I thought was unlikely to be true and ridiculous if it was. In any case, I didn’t make a big deal about it, though thoughts of various “malicious compliance strategies” did go through my head….

One weird thing about this is that they have a separate water dispenser just outside the breakfast area anyways? I was also not sure why this hotel breakfast attendant (who one would assume is not the owner of the hotel) would care so much?

The Bottom Line

One of my go-to hotel breakfast moves is to use a (bigger) coffee cup to get water or juice rather than the (smaller) plastic cups that are typically next to the juice machines. But at a recent Holiday Inn Express stay, the breakfast attendant scolded me for trying to use a coffee cup to get juice (water), saying that I was required to use the smaller plastic cups. It seemed like a strange hill to die on, but what do I know…

What do you think? Was this a reasonable request? Is this a new IHG “brand standard”? Leave your thoughts in the comments below

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