Veteran front desk agent Jacob Tomsky reveals some of the best-kept secrets of the hotel industry.

You don’t have to pay for the minibar (part one)
The minibar is checked (maybe) once a day by a slow-moving gentleman or lady pushing a cart of snacks. You might never even see a minibar attendant. They are like mole people. They peer into the confusion of bottles and bags, looking for something to be replaced, looking for something that is no longer there. They replace it and put a mark on their room chart. These marks are then, at some point in the future, delivered to another fallible human who manually inputs them onto a guest account. Can anyone see the margin for error in this process? Because it’s HUGE.

Maybe the attendant failed to notice the cashews were consumed Monday but catches it on Tuesday and the charge is applied to your bill on Wednesday, even though you just checked in five minutes ago. Even before a guest can manage to get through half of the “I never had these items” sentence, I have already removed the charges and am now simply waiting for them to wrap up their overly zealous denial, so we can both move on with our lives. And this is why, essentially, you are able to eat and drink everything for free.

Never, ever, will the hotel accuse you of lying. That is the absolute last stance hotel management wants to take. You think a respectable hotelier wants to go through your garbage looking for spent M&M’s wrappers?
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