Hotel hacks
What to Do When Your Hotel Has No Coffee Maker
An increasingly common problem, and a genuinely small one if you find out before you arrive.
3 min read · Updated 6 September 2026
More hotels are removing in-room coffee makers than adding them. Some want you buying a flat white in the lobby, some removed the machines during the pandemic and never brought them back, and a lot of design-led and budget properties never fitted them in the first place.
This is a twenty-second packing decision if you know in advance, and a bad morning if you do not.
First, work out what you actually have
"No coffee maker" covers two very different situations.
No coffee maker but a kettle. You are in good shape — better, arguably, than a room with a pod machine. A kettle plus almost any lightweight brewer gives you better coffee than a capsule ever will. This is the norm across the UK, Ireland, most of Europe, Japan and much of Asia.
No coffee maker and no kettle. Common in the United States outside extended-stay properties. You need either a way to heat water or a way to get hot water from someone else.
Our hotels with no in-room coffee maker list shows where we have confirmed this, and each hotel page says whether there is a kettle.
If there is a kettle
Pick one of these. All of them fit in a coat pocket.
- Steeped coffee bags. Coffee in a tea-bag format. Nothing to clean, nothing to carry home, and surprisingly good. The lightest real option there is.
- Specialty instant. The category has improved enormously. Freeze-dried single-origin sachets are genuinely pleasant and weigh nothing.
- A collapsible pour-over cone. Silicone or plastic, folds flat, takes standard filters. Best cup per gram carried.
- An AeroPress Go. Bulkier, but makes the best coffee of anything on this list and packs its mug and stirrer inside itself.
If there is no kettle either
Three options, in order of how much hassle they are.
Ask. Reception and room service will nearly always bring you a pot of hot water, usually free even where coffee is charged. Ask for "hot water for tea" and you will get it without a conversation. This is the single most underused trick in hotel coffee.
Find it on the property. Breakfast service, the club lounge, the gym and the lobby coffee station all have hot water, often before the café opens. A cup filled at 6am from the breakfast urn brews perfectly well upstairs.
Bring a travel kettle. Worth it if you travel constantly and hate depending on other people. Read travel kettles and voltage first — a single-voltage kettle taken to the wrong country is a fire risk, not an inconvenience, and a plug adapter does not fix it.
A microwave heats water perfectly well and plenty of extended-stay rooms have one. Heat the water in a mug, stop before it boils, and stir with a spoon partway through so it does not superheat and erupt when you drop coffee into it.
What not to bother with
The in-room iron. It comes up on travel forums every few months. It does not get hot enough where you need it, it contaminates the plate, and you will ruin a shirt.
The bathroom hot tap. It is not hot enough to brew coffee and, depending on the building's plumbing, is not necessarily water you want to drink.
Tell us what you find
If a hotel page here says the coffee setup is unknown and you have just stayed there, the confirmation form on that page takes about twenty seconds. Traveller reports are how the gaps in a database like this actually get filled.
RoomBrew guides are written by hand and updated when the advice changes. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us — we publish corrections.