Fee to Empty Mini Bar
 

Staying at the Los Suenos Marriott in Costa Rica next and I inquired if there were mini refrigerators in the rooms to keep stuff for the kids. I received the following response:
"About the refrigerator; we have mini bars at all the hotel rooms full of groceries, in case that you want to have it empty there will be one charge for $10 per stay per room; if you would like to find it empty at your arrival please let me know in order to ask housekeeping to take care of this."

Has anyone ever encountered this before? Is this standard policy? Not a big deal just curious.

Never heard of that... wonder what would happen if you emptied it out yourself and put everything non-perishable in a bag next to the fridge and put your stuff in it instead.

I'm guessing they'd rather you bought stuff from the mini bar fridge, rather than bringing your own goodies and this is a "nuisance" fee?

common in Vegas. $25 or so at the Cosmopolitan.

I prefer this method:

I call the front desk and tell them I plan to remove all items and store them all over the room, and let them know to ignore the sensor(s) in the mini-bar. This passive-agressive technique usually results in them waiving the fee and emptying the fridge themselves.

Not usual, but hardly unusual. Don't forget that many high-end places expressly prohibit you from bringing outside food onto the property and also prohibit the storage of outside items in their fridges.

Pay the $10 and call it a day !!! :)

it's not uncommon and IMO I don't believe it's unreasonable

mini-bars today are electronic...if you removed the items I'd be willing to guess the items would be charged to your guest folio...naturally they'd remove the charges once they were returned but I can see this being a big headache

it's actually just a charge to cover their costs of removing the items and returning them to the supply closets...everything has to be properly accounted for etc

while it's written at times I've never known a hotel to prevent a guest from bringing outside food in (except for banquets...those hot plates and crockpots do cause the local fire marshals to get a little hot under the collar)

Several international Hilton hotels have $25 removal policy (Barcelona Mar comes to mind). If I am traveling with my 86 year old mother I tell them that she needs the space for her medication and they have always waived the fee with no problem. If any of your children or your spouse "needs" the space for medication you may want to speak with management.

Utterly unrelated, but this thread reminds me of that scene from the movie "Flight" for some reason:

http://static.rogerebert.com/redacto...x212-54950.jpg

:D

I've seen it before for a $20 fee but never did it.

I was able to shuffle stuff around in the fridge at the Los Suenos Marriott to store a few of my drinks in there. Also, we had no trouble bringing a pizza back into the room even though I saw verbiage about no outside food allowed...that was 4 years ago, so YMMV. Never saw any charges on my room for the mini bar either.

However, we spent way too much on food and alcohol from the bar as it rained all week and my wife and I were holed up during most of our honeymoon, so maybe they made some exceptions.

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

How much was that bill!?

And that's what I thought the OP meant at first- how much to clear out the minibar :o. Volume discount?