Why Some Hotels No Longer Put Coffee Makers in Rooms

If you have noticed more rooms without a coffee maker, you are not imagining it. The direction of travel is real, and the reasons are more interesting than simple cost-cutting.

The reasons, roughly in order

Driving traffic to the lobby. The most common reason at design-led and lifestyle brands. A hotel with a café it wants people to use has an incentive not to solve your coffee problem upstairs. It is a deliberate commercial choice, not an oversight.

Pandemic removals that never reversed. A great many hotels stripped high-touch shared items from rooms in 2020 — coffee makers, glassware, printed compendiums. Glassware came back. Coffee makers often did not, because by the time anyone reviewed the decision the machines had been in storage for two years and nobody was asking for them.

Cleaning cost. A pod machine is genuinely awkward to clean properly between guests. Removing it removes a housekeeping task and a complaint category.

Room design. Minimal rooms have minimal surfaces. In small-footprint urban properties, a brewer and its supplies compete with the desk for the only usable counter.

Brand positioning. Some upmarket properties consider an in-room pod machine slightly downmarket and would rather you ordered room service or used the lounge. A five-star room with no coffee maker is usually making a point.

Where you should expect it

Patterns rather than rules, and always worth checking the individual property:

• Design and lifestyle brands in city centres — most likely to have removed them.
• Small independent boutiques — often never had them.
• Luxury properties — mixed. Some have excellent machines, some deliberately have none.
• Extended-stay and suite properties — reliably still have them, often with a kitchenette.
• Mid-range chains and airport hotels — still very likely to have one.
• Outside North America — a kettle is more likely than a coffee maker, which for most purposes is better news.

Is it actually worse?

For anyone who cares about coffee, an in-room pod machine was never the good option. It gave you old coffee from a machine nobody had descaled.

A room with a kettle and no coffee maker is genuinely better: it is a general-purpose hot water source, and almost anything you bring will beat a capsule.

A room with neither is the real loss, and it is worth knowing before you arrive. That is the whole reason this site exists — see hotels with no in-room coffee maker.

What to do about it

Check before you book, or at least before you pack. If the room has nothing, the fix is small: coffee bags or specialty instant weigh a few grams, and reception will nearly always give you hot water if you ask for it as tea.

And if the hotel has quietly removed its machines, tell us. A traveller who stayed last month is better evidence than any page we can crawl.