With the onslaught of food delivery apps like Uber Eats, room service has lost its decades-long advantage of being the only option for hungry hotel guests who can’t be bothered to sit upright at a restaurant.
Sure, ordering delivery deprives guests of the white tablecloth, real utensils, and opulence of little ketchup bottles, but is it worth the awkwardness of hovering in your robe as a hotel employee sets up your table? And why wouldn’t you want to try a buzzy local restaurant instead of an outrageously overpriced, generic hamburger?
In this new era, some hotels have taken the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach by forming partnerships with the apps, like My Place Hotels of America did with Grubhub in February, eliminating delivery fees for guests and auto-populating their orders with the hotel’s drop-off instructions. (The WSJ recently called this approach “DIY room service.”) In 2021, Resorts World nixed in-room dining altogether, encouraging guests to order from their onsite restaurants via Grubhub, and the app is continuing to pitch this kind of partnership to other hotel chains.
But in the “still trying to beat them” category are the hotels making it difficult for delivery couriers to drop off food, restricting access to guest rooms with key card-activated elevators, or that have launchedapps of their own to make room service seem just as convenient (and delivery-like).
Many hotels are also leaning into the elements that make room service special and luxurious—such as adding in-room dining experiences involving champagne or specialty tea service. Along these lines, Royal Palms Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, launched an in-room happy hour, complete with bar snacks and a custom playlist. Meanwhile, others are placing more of an emphasis on the “concierge” side of the equation. For instance, the Four Seasons Boston has a “coffee concierge” on staff for in-room coffee deliveries, and Solage Auberge Resorts Collection in Napa Valley boasts a “caviar concierge” for their “art of caviar” experience.
That said, the future of room service is in peril, something for which delivery apps shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame. For starters, the financials on room service have never been great for hotels. Even before a downward trend kicked off in 2007, room service revenue made up just 1.52% of total hotel revenue. That’s probably why the press has beenwritingobituaries for room service since 2013, when the 2,000-room New York Hilton Midtown announced they were discontinuing it, citing a decline in customer requests. “For some hotels, room service is not meant to make profit,” remarked then-president of Hotel & Leisure Advisors David J. Sangree, but rather “is a brand standard” that many guests expect.
A decade later, many hotels that stopped room service during the pandemic, citing staffing shortages and low demand, never resumed it. According to the Washington Post, revenue for room service plummeted 32.5% from 2019 to 2023, and beverage room service was down 18%. There are fewer people to make and deliver the food, too, as hotel staffing has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, per the American Hotel & Lodging Association, 87% of U.S. hotels say they’re short on staff.
Aaron Coburn, general manager of St. Julien Hotel & Spa in Boulder, Colorado, believes the pandemic played the biggest role in overhauling their approach to room service, but it also gave them a chance to reevaluate what never really worked in the first place. “We no longer offer door hangers for guests to pre-order their food,” he explains. “Coming in first thing in the morning to find 20 door hangers, all with requested delivery times between 7 to 7:30 am doesn’t set our team up for success.” The hotel also moved menus online and stopped offering 24-hour service because there was no longer enough demand to support the staffing it required.
At Halcyon, a hotel in Denver, in-room dining remains “a small but consistent part” of the hotel’s business, even as it trends downward. “During COVID, most hotels’ in-room dining went to a grab-and-go option, as takeout from the restaurant in to-go packaging,” says managing director McClinton Heil. “Most hotels are still doing this model today.” Halcyon has since brought back real plateware but has fully switched over to digital ordering.
Interestingly, for many hospitality professionals in luxury hotels, where cost effectiveness and convenience will never trump the quiet ceremony of lifting a silver dome-shaped lid by the side of your bed, delivery apps aren’t considered competition. “To be exact, there are 40 different service standards that define a perfect room service experience,” explains Coburn. “The delivery apps offer something very different.”
Many of these hotels, though, are attempting to retool the aspects of room service that people dislike, such as the hell of trying to fall asleep when your room smells of leftovers because you were too lazy to call for someone to take it away. The Equinox Hotel in New York City serves its room service menu of “functional,” superfood-laden meals and drinks in a sleek compartmentalized tiffin box with drawers, “which ensures freshness and flavor preservation while banishing any lingering odors from the room,” says a rep.
Chris Norton, CEO of Equinox Hotels, explains that the delivery apps pushed them to let guests order through in-room iPads and to offer “functional foods and dietary needs that may not be readily available through traditional room service offerings.” To this end, the brand recently introduced a gut health room service menu featuring prebiotic- and probiotic-rich foods, like kimchi and yogurt.
Again, a lot of these shifts have been in motion for years. Virgin Hotels launched a dedicated mobile app called Lucy in 2015 that allows users to check-in, adjust room lighting, and order room service. Plus, Virgin Hotels’ two-chamber room design lets guests close the door to their bedroom for the full contactless, eye-contact-less experience, with the option to send a cashless tip to hotel staff through the app. (Doug Carrillo, chief marketing officer at Virgin Hotels Collection, says 65% of their room service orders are now done through the TV.)
It’s hard, though, to imagine the extinction of room service when hotel restaurants and bars are the best they’ve ever been. Luxury hotels today are expected to court respected chefs to oversee their food and beverage programs, and many of the country’s greatest restaurants are now located inside of hotels. They’re proper destinations in their own right, and not just outlets for guests who have no other options. As Becky Hughes wrote in the New York Times back in 2023, “Over the past few years there’s been a boom in honestly good, New Yorker-approved restaurants that just happen to be in boutique hotels. You could spend an entire weekend visiting hotels as dining destinations, rather than as necessary stopovers with middle-of-the-road (at best) food.”
Could you also spend an entire weekend visiting hotels as exceptional room service destinations? Maybe. But at some point you may just want a taste of home—delivered in a brown paper bag.
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