Are Hotel Coffee Makers Clean?

Broadly: less clean than you would like, and less dangerous than the internet suggests.

Housekeeping cleans what is visible. A carafe gets rinsed; the inside of a machine that has water standing in it does not. Nobody descales a hotel pod brewer between guests, and a machine sitting warm and damp for weeks in a low-occupancy room is a reasonable place for a biofilm to develop.

That said, brewing water runs hot, and there is no meaningful pattern of people getting ill from hotel coffee makers. The realistic complaint is taste, not safety: stale water, mineral scale, and whatever the last guest brewed.

The two-minute routine

Do this once when you arrive, regardless of the machine.

1. Look inside. Open the water reservoir and the pod chamber. If there is standing water, tip it out. If there is visible mould or scale, stop — use the lobby or ask for a different machine.
2. Wash the removable parts. Carafe, lid, pod holder, filter basket. Hot water and a hand towel in the bathroom sink. This is the part most likely to be genuinely dirty and the part easiest to fix.
3. Run a full cycle of plain water and throw it away. No pod, no grounds. This flushes the lines, warms the machine, and removes most of what you would otherwise taste. Repeat once if the first cup smells of anything.

That is it. It costs two minutes and fixes the large majority of the problem.

What about descaling?

Not realistic in a hotel, and not necessary for a few days' use. Scale affects taste and heating efficiency rather than safety.

If a machine is visibly furred with limescale, the cup will taste chalky and flat and there is not much you can do about it in a week. Use the kettle instead if there is one.

The reservoir question

Some in-room brewers have a fixed reservoir you fill from the bathroom tap. Two things worth knowing.

Fill it from the tap you would drink from. In most of Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia that is the bathroom cold tap. Where tap water is not potable, use bottled water — the machine does not make unsafe water safe.

Do not use the hot tap. Hot water sits in a building's tank, picks up more dissolved metals, and in older buildings is not intended for drinking.

If you would rather not use it at all

Entirely reasonable, and there are easy alternatives:

• Use the kettle if there is one — a kettle boils, which is a meaningfully higher bar than a pod machine's brew temperature, and it is far easier to inspect.
• Use the lobby coffee, which is made in commercial equipment cleaned on a schedule.
• Bring your own brewer. An AeroPress or a pour-over cone means the only equipment involved is yours.

Related: how to make good coffee in a hotel room