Not if you want to chill drinks quickly. Not everyone is spending multiple nights in their hotel rooms to have enough time to wait for the fridge to do it's thing.
Let's chill out with the microaggressions. Dead people are still people, they have feelings, and they have every right to chew on hotel ice flavored with Sprite if that's their prerogative.
I haven't been to a hotel in a long long time, at least not in one nice enough to have an icemaker. However, when I was younger I was a lot more cavalier about bacteria, germs, etc. Nowadays, I'm a lot more cautious and probably would not use hotel ice in a drink.
It's early afternoon and you're on the front end of a 48 hour work trip. You just got off a plane in Cedar Rapids, found a rental car, and drove to the hotel. You've been traveling since 7:00am, the water bottle that you refilled at the connection in Chicago and again at the destination in Cedar Rapids is both disgustingly warm and mostly empty. The rental car was hot as fuck because it's Cedar Rapids in July and the rental cars are sitting in an open lot rather than a garage.
Let's Zork this out.
You need to cool down and rehydrate. Do you:
a) buy a single use refrigerated bottle of water
b) remember that there's a fridge in the room and wait for 2 hours
c) go east
d) get yourself some bucket ice and tap water
Get one cold beverage from the refrigerated section, drink it while getting something hot (I like the chicken fingers and potato wedges all grocery stores seem to have)
Get a 6-pack of something tasty (I like fancy root beer)
Drink cold one on the way back
Put ice on bucket (nobody should be consuming the I've directly) and a couple bottles in the ice, and the rest in the mini fridge
Poop and shower
Enjoy what's left of your evening with the frosty root beers and hopefully still-warm chicken and wedges
I bring my Steam Deck along with me, so I'd much rather stay in with my chicken fingers and soda than meet up with people I probably don't like much anyway.
Every time my ex and I would check into a hotel she'd immediately fill the ice bucket. And it would sit there, unused, until we checked out or it melted, at which time she'd have me empty it and fill it with ice again, which would then just sit there and melt.
Your wife will do well when the water wars start and you'd be wise to start following her lead.
As as aside, next time you know you're going to a hotel bring a secret, second ice bucket to fill shortly after she fills the hotel one. Bonus points if you can acquire it from the hotel so they're identical.
Don't mention it or anything, just let her work out the logistics of what happened when she notices. If she's as serious about hotel ice as she sounds, you'll probably get laid right then and there.
I was going to say liquor, but yeah. You can use it for soda too if you buy a 12 pack and bring it back to the hotel with you instead of letting the drink machine nickel and dime you.
The last hotel I stayed at (fancy expensive hotel for a company gathering) had a mini fridge stocked with ridiculously expensive items, in such a way that the fridge was unusable for outside items. There was also a note that any items removed from the fridge would automatically be charged to the room. There was one bottle of complimentary water on the counter though.
God there was one where I bumped against the fridge and shifted a bunch of items that all showed up on my bill. I think a lot of the Disney hotels work on that system as well.
Yep, champagne is our main use case. If the wife and I are staying someplace nice, we love to get a bottle of champagne and some nice cheese at a local store and hang out in the room at least one night.
Americans tend to like ice in their water and in their drinks. When I was a kid, my family would typically grab a bucket full of ice to cool down the tap water we would drink in the evenings.
Hotel ice can be really funky, though, and I think the practice may be falling out of fashion in any case.
This is it. And it's because tap water can be really different from locale to locale. If you're not used to it, it can taste quite bad. And room temperature water from the tap can enhance the flavor. So people put ice in it to cover it up.
I once left a 5 star review for a hotel purely because the hotel was what I expect from a hotel, but there was someone actively cleaning out the ice machine while we were bringing stuff into the room.
Nothing seemed eslecially clean or cared for while we were there, but I had never seen someone clean one before. Or cleaned the drink dispensers after breakfast is over.
I actually have a UV light I take with me on trips for both rock hunting and for hotels. Some hotels you just learn to avoid.
Hard pass on putting the ice in drinks. This is true of hotels and any fast food or restaurant: their ice dispensers are absolutely crawling with bacteria. Some probably even have live rats in them. Don't fuck with ice, they're all disgusting.
I don't think I've ever been to a hotel that didn't have an ice dispenser/bucket, but have been to plenty that don't have a fridge. Heck, Motel 6 has ice machines and a stupid plastic bucket.
Yup. I was super surprised when I heard that in Europe, they don't give you ice by default, and they give you seltzer unless you ask specifically for something else.
I feel like I'm the only person who goes to a hotel to sleep, not chill a 24 pack of diet Coke and a bottle of champagne to drink (without this hotel ice) after eating a ham sandwich out of my rolling cooler which needs a top off.
Where are you all traveling with your champagne and ham sandwiches?!
