Under new environmental regulations, hotels and other lodging establishments in South Korea with more than 50 rooms will no longer be allowed to provide complimentary single-use toiletries such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, and razors starting later this month. Hotels that provide these items will be fined up to $2245 (3 million won).
In response to this new regulation, many large Korean hotels have already begun to replace individual-use bathroom products with multi-use items. For instance, Lotte, Shilla, and Paradise hotels have started offering large dispensers for shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in their guest rooms.
Mid-scale hotels are facing a problem of theft of consumables when they switch to multi-use products. The manager of a boutique hotel in Gyeonggi Province complained that some guests keep taking all the large-capacity products that were recently replaced as amenities. To tackle this issue, many mid-scale hotels are opting for vending machines that dispense disposable items. Some companies specialize in hotel amenity vending machines, allowing guests to buy single-use items using credit cards or other payment methods.
In the consumer community, many people say, “Is it paradoxical that hotels ban disposable amenities, yet vending machines sell them?” On Korea’s largest hotel and lodging review community, there are posts such as, “Isn’t it advantageous that only hotels can reduce the price of amenities?” and “Shouldn’t hotels reduce their prices because they don’t provide disposable items?”
Some have compared it to overseas examples. Taiwan requires hotels to offer a 5% discount when guests bring their own reusable items instead of using disposable ones. “In Korea, it would be more effective to provide incentives such as point rewards and discounts to customers who do not use disposable products,” said a retailer.
