Hotel Threatens $50 Charge Per Dirty Towel: Reasonable?

In a Facebook group for Marriott Bonvoy members, a person shares an interesting notice they saw at a Marriott property, and it got me wondering (thanks to LoyaltyLobby for flagging this)…

Hotel threatens $20-50 charge for dirty towels

The Aloft Rogers-Bentonville in Arkansas reportedly has a laminated sign in guest rooms, explaining the “Hotel Towel Policy.” Here’s the content of the notice:

To maintain the highest standards of cleanliness and comfort for all guests, we kindly ask you to take note of our towel policy:

• Normal Use: Towels are provided for your convenience and are intended for drying off after a shower.
• Stains: Please inform our housekeeping staff if a towel becomes stained. We understand that accidents happen and will do our best to clean the towel.
• Severe Stains: A replacement fee of $20-50 per towel may be applied to your bill for severe stains that cannot be removed through normal cleaning processes.
• Avoiding Charges: To avoid any charges, please use towels responsibly and avoid using them for activities that may cause stains (e.g., removing makeup, or cleaning shoes).

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

I’ve gotta say, in all my years of staying at hotels, I’ve never seen a sign like this. That being said, from researching the topic online, it seems like there are a fair number of hotels with this type of policy.

My take on this hotel’s aggressive towel policy

My first instinct is of course that this is completely ridiculous, but let’s try to talk through it a bit more than that.

The first thing I find to be in bad faith about this initiative is the amount of the charges being threatened. The hotel wants to charge $20-50 per towel for replacement, in the event of an accident? Aloft is a limited service brand, and hotels buy towels at heavily discounted prices, given the volume. Aloft can probably get close to 10 standard sized hotels for $50. Is the hotel trying to just recoup its costs, or is it trying to turn this into a revenue stream?

Now, to look at it from the hotel’s perspective, there are some things that guests can take with them when leaving a hotel, and some things they can’t. Towels fit in the latter category, so I suppose there’s a reasonable expectation that items that can’t be taken home should be returned in decent condition. Like, if you smash the TV or lamp in your room, you’d expect to get charged for that.

But I also feel like wear and tear on some things is a cost of doing business, and dirty towels should be among those. If someone starts bleeding, or if a child has an “accident” that needs to be cleaned up, or if you’re trying to clean up a food mess, then using a towel doesn’t seem like an unreasonable move.

There’s a difference between using towels for painting classes (fully knowing what’s going to happen), vs. responding to an unexpected situation with towels.

That brings me to my next question — is this really such a big issue that it’s worth it for the hotel to put energy into chasing down guests? Like, even if the hotel wanted to charge for towels, how exactly does the towel tracking work, and how often does this end in an argument between a hotel employee and guest?

All of that leads me to believe that the sign is more a threat than anything, intended to encourage people to use towels as “responsibly” as possible. The high price tag is probably encouraged to make guests even more cautious about how they use towels.

I can’t imagine it’s worth the effort to go after people in this way. Then again, we live in an era where the concept of hospitality really is lost on some hotel owners (while many hotel groups do nothing to enforce standardized practices).

Bottom line

An Aloft is threatening to charge guests $20-50 per dirty towel. The hotel suggests that towels are only for drying off, and using them for other purposes could lead to a fine. While I can appreciate a hotel not wanting a huge number of towels ruined, this just seems to me like a very inhospitable policy.

What do you make of the concept of hotels charging for “dirty” towels (or at least threatening to charge)?