World’s Largest Hotel Chain to Ban Small Toiletry Bottles

Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, is the latest hospitality group to announce it will eliminate small plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and bath gel from its guest rooms, Associated Press reports.

The hotel chain will remove these bottles from its hotel rooms worldwide by December 2020 and replace them with wall-mounted dispensers in lower-priced hotels and untethered, larger bottles in high-end hotels.

Marriott has more than 7,000 hotels in 131 countries under 30 brands, including SpringHill Suites, Residence Inn, Sheraton, and Ritz-Carlton. The chain will be eliminating about 500 million small bottles each year, or 1.7 million pounds of plastic.

Marriott officials say they have wanted to get rid of the small bottles for years because they are difficult to clean for recycling. They have been working to design tamper-resistant large bottles and get suppliers on board. High-end hotels needed plastic bottles that were refillable or recyclable but still felt luxurious.

This summer, InterContinental Hotels Group was the first global hotel brand to commit to removing all miniature toiletry bottles from guest rooms.The group, which owns Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels, plans to remove the plastic bottles from all 843,000 guest rooms by 2021. It has already removed the bottles from about one-third of its rooms, replacing them with bulk dispensing systems.