WASHINGTON – No more breakfast in bed for you. And forget having that 1 a.m. tasty treat delivered to your hotel room.
The New York Hilton Midtown hotel will no longer offer room service to any of its 2,000 rooms. After this summer, if you are hungry at the Hilton, your choice will be the newly built 24-hour cafeteria-style eatery.
“You can be sure that if Hilton was making money on room service, they would keep it,” says George Hobica, travel expert for Tingo.com. Hobica says many hotels lose money on food service to rooms — especially after breakfast when the demand slows down and the staff is still on call.
“I’m seeing a lot of hotels trying out different things to really meet what the customers are looking for,” says Jean Newman Glock, global relations director for Connoisseur Travel, Ltd.
The Hilton noticed many of its customers going to neighboring eateries to buy their food and bring it back to their rooms.
“The Hilton is trying to recapture a lot of the income that they see local establishments getting,” Glock says.
Glock thinks five-star hotels will continue to offer room service, but Hobica thinks they, too, will start to do away with in-room dining and other perks, including front-door baggage handlers.
“It’s kinda like when the airlines stopped giving meals during flights,” Hobica says. “One airline did it and then another and another — it may be an avalanche, who knows. We’ll see.”
Follow @WTOP and @WTOPliving on Twitter.
