Have you ever stayed in a nice hotel but would never go back there because their breakfast coffee was just too bad? I have. And in fact, the coffee is a serious criterion for me when it comes to rating a hotel.
Shockingly, most of the places I would discount for future stays despite good locations and other good attributes for the simple reason that their coffee was undrinkable were located in heartland of coffee: Italy. A few years back, I travelled to Rome. I stayed in a four-star hotel that seriously only had a coffee machine, the kind of which you would find in a hospital lobby.
It was truly shocking. However, it was not the only such place in Italy I came across. I also managed to find another four-star hotel in Milan that was similar in that regard (the one close to the hair salon I told you about two weeks ago). The hotel was actually very nice, had a great location and nice staff, but I just could not get over the coffee. For me, my morning coffee is the most important event of the day. It is non-negotiable, and it needs to be a good, strong, flavoursome latte or cappuccino; and from a four-star hotel that charges a couple of dozens of Euros for breakfast, I also expect excellent foam on a barista-made coffee and not something I have to get out of a 1990s machine. Call me high-maintenance, but I really cannot accept that. It’s not like I am asking for champagne.
Another coffee-related ‘won’t go there again’ criterion I apply to hotels is the in-room coffee situation.
Don’t get me wrong, back in the day when I could barely afford a 3-star hotel or bed and breakfast, I was very happy if there was a clean kettle and a few sachets of Nescafé (or the local spin-off) in the room. It is completely fine and acceptable for that category of hotel and at least it woke me up. What I do not find acceptable though is when you are staying at a higher category place and you cannot even make yourself an espresso in the room. After all, you should get what you pay for.
Recently, I stayed in a four-star hotel in Mallorca – with a 5-star price minus the service – that offered exactly that. A kettle and an IKEA mug (the kind you find abandoned in the office kitchen) with one sachet of local Nes and no spoon to stir it in sight. I honestly could not believe it. Worse yet, when I checked out after having had my “big breakfast” as they called it, the lady honestly told me: “I see you had one additional coffee for breakfast [Yes, I tend to drink two, especially when there’s none in the room] … But it’s OK, I’ll gift it to you.” I was gobsmacked. I literally paid an arm and a leg for the night and here she was counting my coffees. It wasn’t the lack of service, the ineffective aircon, lack of toiletries or sub-par restaurant recommendations that got me about this hotel; no, it was the coffee remark that immediately made me think: Bye-bye, hotel, you will never see me again.
During that stay in Spain, I moved to another hotel the next day. Initially, because I had had a change in dates for my trip, but also because the first hotel I stayed at was just terribly overpriced. The second hotel wasn’t much better when it came to their coffee-rating. There was no facility, not even a kettle in the room and the breakfast coffee (yes, from the infamous hospital lobby machine) was so undrinkable (thin and sweet somehow and that’s your black coffee with no added sugar button) that I will not choose this hotel next time I go. It’s a shame, because many other aspects of it were actually good.
Isn’t it the simple things like that, or at least things I believe could be very simple that make or break a hotel stay for you? I really do not understand why so little attention is paid to this aspect of hospitality, especially in countries with an excellent coffee culture. For me, great coffee can easily take a hotel from 6 out of 10 to 10 out of 10 points and the bad coffee can do the exact opposite. In fact, it is so important to me that when I started upgrading the kind of accommodation I would stay at, I would check whether the hotel had an in-room coffee machine running on capsules and save on breakfast altogether, bringing a pack of oatmeal to get me going in the morning and shaving off a good 30€+ a night from the grand total. Just the coffee was the non-negotiable part in it. In most European cities you would anyway want to try the local bakeries and buy a croissant for less than a tenth of the breakfast charge while being happily caffeinated. It was the best deal for me at the time and one that allowed me to go to nicer hotels when my budget was tight.
As my employment situation improved and travel budgets grew out of the student years, I have become a huge fan of hotel breakfasts. They can really make you feel like you are truly on a holiday, but coffee still plays the biggest role in them for me.
And while you cannot know the coffee situation in the breakfast room before you book, you can scan the pictures and read the small print to find out whether there’s at least a machine in the room that will take you from sleepy to happy in the morning! Just don’t over-do it. You might be allowed only one 🙂
The comfy traveller's diaries 