If someone chooses a cheap hotel that offers a buffet breakfast and skips all other meals just to eat a huge amount in the morning, wouldn’t that person be making a huge gain?
If someone chooses a cheap hotel that offers a buffet breakfast and skips all other meals just to eat a huge amount in the morning, wouldn’t that person be making a huge gain?
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The stuff that goes on that breakfast buffet is very cheap and it’s set up to minimize labor. It costs them very little to run
It’s just part of being a mid-range hotel. The items on offer are generally not top-tier and for every guest that’s a pig, plenty don’t even eat breakfast. Also, after age 25, the idea of eating three times what you would otherwise just because it’s free really loses its appeal.
Also, like 95% of questions here, this is not unique to the US.
Those buffets are fairly mediocre and not large. It’s a decent fringe benefit, but that’s it. And it’s not unique to the US. Breakfast buffets are pretty standard at many Japanese hotels.
Most cheaper to mid range motels do offer free breakfast, but it tends to be rather basic, and only available for very limited hours, typically 7 am – 10 am or there about. Quality of breakfast varies, on the low end it may just be fountain juice concentrate, coffee and prepackaged pastry, along with maybe some bulk pack cereal. On the upper end it may include hot buffet table with sausage, eggs, oatmeal, toast, etc. even DIY waffle and pancake makers.
Sure a few people will eat a lot, but most of it goes to waste anyway and gets thrown out when breakfast service ends, as the food quality is never that great.
It’s an expected amenity. I won’t book a hotel unless it has free breakfast.
It’s not exactly a high quality breakfast, so the expense is minimal
The draw of the free food gets customers. The food is cheap to get and make. Rarely does anyone go over 1 or 2 average amounts of food per person. They have the right to say no if they think you’re just stealing food and throwing it away and not eating it.
Because people will subconsciously be willing to pay a little more to get a “free” breakfast when choosing a hotel. The breakfast items they serve are also often cheap and easy to put out. If the cost of the breakfast averages to $3 a person, but they get $5-10 more from a room that’s a pretty decent profit.
In luxery hotels, the breakfast buffet can be as important as the room design. For many, it’s the last chance for the hotel to pamper and leave a positive, lasting impression on the guest.
When I used to travel a lot, the hotels without great breakfast buffets were kind of sad. Almost everyone loves a posh buffet to start their day.
I suppose hotel operators are smart enough that they can price the cost of a breakfast into the room so that they don’t lose money.
Why do you think they can’t figure that out?
If you ate enough breakfast to really mess with the profit margins, the hotel would likely decline to host you in the future, and would likely request that you find alternate lodging for the evening.
There is also a lot of societal pressure on people to not do this. Most of us would not want to look to be this cheap, desperate, and poor in public.
I mean, no one is going to care if you have a hearty breakfast… but the offerings on tap for most buffet breakfasts is going to leave you miserable if you try this. And even mid tier hotels, the best that you’re really looking at is a vat of freeze dried scrambled eggs, waffles, and perhaps a cereal bar.
This is common here in Europe, too.
Many travelers are up early and get moving to hike or sightsee and don’t have time to wait in line at a cafe or sit down for a full breakfast.
And busy bees like that need food to fuel their miles of walking around. Coffee and a cigarette may do it for Mediterraneans who take a 2 hour lunch and a nap, but not for busy tourists who start early and don’t stop until bedtime.
Hi, I was the executive chef at a 3 star service level hotel for 6 years.
The cost of the free or complementary breakfast buffet is built in to your room cost. My budget was $4.00 per guest.
While occasionally a guest might eat more than expected, no one was skipping other meals and making up for it with the breakfast buffet.
Some guest will eat more than others and some will eat less or skip the buffet entirely, it balances out.
A free buffet isn’t supposed to make the hotel money, it’s an amenity to drive business, to get people to stay at the hotel. Much like having a pool and fitness center. And I can say that my breakfast program was consistently mentioned as one of the reasons for repeat business in guest surveys. I also was under my target food budget every year.
Shit it’s like 200+ dollars to stay at a shitty two star on the low end of the price point, I find it hard to believe they aren’t making money off me even if I like my plate with tons of food.
The breakfasts are never very high quality. If I spend a lot of time at hotels for work, I sometimes stop eating the hotel breakfast and grab gas station food instead because my stomach will settle better with the gas station food.
The name of the game is “increasing occupancy.”
My WAG is that getting only two or three more rooms occupied for one night more than pays for the entire breakfast spread the next morning.
$150 room and the food is worth like $4
You don’t want to eat a huge amount of what is offered, trust me. Except kids. My kids love a hotel breakfast buffet.
This isn’t an American thing. In fact, they have breakfast buffets in Asia that blow what we have in the US out of the water. I have no idea how they make money there, but clearly they do.
Besides, the types of breakfasts they have for free at cheaper hotels here is usually very lousy and you really wouldn’t want a lot of it anyway.
Here’s a good video I saw recently on the history of the continental breakfast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTpBRp1ltc
That individual would, and if the hotel was full and they somehow organized everyone staying there to do the say same thing, then yes, probably, for that small period of time the hotel would “lose money.”
However most people eat an appropriate amount, some people skip it entirely, and I’m sure a few people “take advantage” of the situation and go all out.
It balances out in the end.
Also keep in mind that “free” is never free – if they didn’t have a “free” breakfast your nightly rate would be some amount lower, $10 – $20.
It’s an amenity that a lot of travelers look for when booking a hotel. A lot of people don’t want to take the extra time and spend more money to go to a regular restaurant for breakfast. They just want to eat something without fuss right there and get going with their day. So offering it helps drive room bookings. But a lot of the guests don’t eat the breakfast, and most of the ones who do have no interest in making themselves sick by overeating. So a few guests with huge appetites isn’t enough to affect profits.
Generally what they’re offering is extremely cheap, basic food items that are also fairly bulky. It would be very difficult to impossible for some particularly stingy person to eat some sort of large dollar amount worth of it that really shifts the average cost per guest.
To some extent they’re kind of a win for both the hotel and the guest.
For the hotel – the guest tends to value the amenity significantly more than the guest actually costs to serve. If guests are willing to pay $5 more for a hotel with free breakfast and in reality it costs the hotel $3 to serve them, it’s profitable.
For the guest – since they’re traveling, they don’t have those basic breakfast items on hand, they can be a pain to get while traveling, there may not be anywhere nearby for breakfast – and if there is, even the cheapest diner will cost more than $5. Most of the time people who want “free hotel breakfast” are just looking for some basic fuel to start their day.
With all you can eat generally, you could stuff yourselves five times over and they would still profit from it.
Mid range hotels absorb this aspartame of room rate.
I rarely eat breakfast. For the ones who eat s you, there are people like me who don’t.
The breakfast isn’t good enough that they’d lose money.
If they were losing money they wouldn’t do it, that’s all there is to that.
If they were worried they wouldn’t offer it
They are serving a big breakfast. It is typically fruit, bagels, muffins, cereal and milk in your cheaper hotels and even the mid-price will have just eggs or waffles along with the other stuff.
The people who overeat a buffet like that is balanced out by all the people who skip breakfast.
I travel a good bit, nationally (USA) and internationally. I love watching people at breakfast. I’m fascinated by the number of American’s that eat some toast or a pastry and drink coffee. Maybe they eat cereal, some eggs, maybe meat. American buffets suck. When I go to other countries the breakfasts are normally great with tons of fruit, veggies, salad options, and savory foods that are not eggs and breakfast sausage. And even then, I watch people not eat. I watched one lady force herself to down three pieces of cut fruit and tell her partner that she was stuffed. I on the other hand had a salad, some noodle soup, and a sandwich (Thailand was great).
But in the US, I rarely eat anything. Its normally only some eggs, maybe bacon, and breads. If I am lucky there is oatmeal and I can have some of that. If I am super lucky, some fruit. I hate breakfast in the USA.
This might be a better question for r/AskEconomics as this is less an American question and more of a business question.
It’s the same reason that I can also take three hour long showers a day, turn the air conditioning down to 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) and leave the TV on without fear of repercussions. When setting their room rates, hotels take all of this into account. There are certainly some guests who take more than their fair share, but there are guests who take less.
It’s kind of like the idea of loss leaders where a grocery store will sell rotisserie chickens at a loss with the assumption that a vast majority of the people will not go in to just pick up a chicken. The difference is that all of the costs are already built into your room rate.
Frankly, the average hotel breakfast is not super high quality and you’d be surprised at the rates places like hotels can on below restaurant quality food. And it’s not like a restaurant. The breakfast does not have to generate a profit, just not at a loss for the total budget per guest, which I’m assuming is less than $10 per day.
Ultimately, even if you severely overeat, it’s likely still not the most expensive thing that you could cost the hotel.
Continental breakfasts are something that is offered in most mid to high-range establishments, think Motel 8, Ramada, Holiday Inn, etc…
The thing to note is they aren’t serving high-quality stuff; most places you get a basic gambit of eggs, cereal, sausage, and either pancakes, waffles, or both. This stuff can be made in bulk, is rather filling, and is, most importantly, cheap.
The price comes out of your room fee, and generally covers the amount for up to 4 guests.
Hotel buffets are usually cheap frozen crap set out on a few trays so the hotel can use “free food” as a selling point.
Some hotels have good restaurants, but they’re either very expensive hotels or you have to order and pay for your food separately.
Typically if a hotel is offering free breakfast, it’s not a luxury hotel. Those would be basic hotel chains like Holiday Inn, comfort inn, best westerns. They’re geared more toward families as parents who are on vacation like the idea of having one less meal to worry about while on vacation. But they’re pretty much the cheapest version of breakfast you can get.
Usually if a luxury hotel has breakfast, it’s part of room service and will be added onto your bill later.
Frankly, we often skip the free breakfast buffets if we are staying in a foodie town with good restaurants. So for all the families chowing down, there are people like us who don’t even take advantage of them. Also, these breakfasts are generally not luxe, and the foods have low price points.
Most free breakfasts are terrible.