Mini-bar

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A mini-bar is a small, private snack and beverage bar often found in upscale Western-style hotel rooms.

Typically, a mini-bar comes in the form of a counter and small refrigerator stocked with a precise inventory. The room's guests can take a beverage or snack at any time during their stay. The bar is commonly stocked with small bottles of alcoholic beverages, juice, and soft drinks as well as candy (sweets), cookies (sweet biscuits), crackers (savoury biscuits) and other small snacks. Prices are generally very high relative to similar items purchased in a store, since the guest is paying for the convenience of the items and upkeep of the bar. Many hotels have progressed further to offer non-food items, such as socks, toiletries, and condoms. Some even use infrared or other high-tech methods of automatically recording purchases.

[edit] History

The German company Siegas introduced the first refrigerated mini-bar in the early 1960s. Earlier mini-bars did not have refrigerators, so the idea likely stretches back at least to the early 1950s.

Although Siegas introduced the first mini refrigerator in the early 1950s, it was not until Robert Arnold who as Director of Food and Beverage and his team of hotel executives, including Joe Wu, EAM Ian Duncan and Senior Vice President and General Manager of Hilton International Ken Moss that the Hong Kong Hilton in 1974 first experimented with the idea of introducing honesty mini bars to the Hotel industry.

Robert Arnold then came across the miniature liquor bottles when flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong on Thai International in 1974. On arrival in Hong Kong, Arnold arranged for samples of all miniatures to be sent to him. The miniatures were too expensive to use in the daily operation of the bars and then other ideas were thrown around for other uses.

The Hong Kong Hilton at that time had 840 rooms and suites and ran at an occupancy of 97% year round and was the most profitable hotel within Hilton International at that period. The hotel had small refrigerators in every room in which soft drinks and mineral water was given away to the guests. This cost of free drinks was costing the hotel a considerable amount of money and gaining no revenue benefits.

The F&B team headed up by Arnold came up with the idea of a small shelf to hold 2 of each type of Spirit and place these mini shelves into the rooms and fill the refrigerators with beer, wine, champagne, mixes and soft drinks, which would be sold to the guests on an honesty usage factor.

One floor was initially installed with the mini bars concept after considerable research was done as to how the bars could be both controlled for sales and costs. The team by this time had expanded to also include the Executive House keeper, the Front Office Manager and the Bell Captain.

As part of the control system a mini bar operator was trained to refill all bars on a daily basis, (new for used) and fill out a master form of usage. The bill was placed adjacent to each bar in which the guest would fill out their usage. This bill was collected by the mini bar operator and taken to the Front Office for collating into the guest's bill portfolio.

It took the team almost three months to get the system working with minimal losses and was shown to generate excellent drinks revenue for the rooms. Drinks sales improved by 500% over normal room service sales. The General Manager then agreed to install all 840 rooms and suites with the system. Arnold arranged with the beverage suppliers to do the initial fill of the mini refrigerators on a complimentary basis as they all saw the enormous potential sales of their products.

At the end of the first full months of operations, losses amounted to only 5% of costs against a very high revenue factor. The General Manager in his monthly report to corporate headquarters in New York announced the introduction of the mini bars and the profit revenue it achieved in the first month and predicted that this profit would increase the bottom line of the hotel by nearly another 5%. New York obviously saw this potential and introduced this honesty system to all its hotels worldwide, which was then copied by all the other international chains.

The rest is history with practically every 4 and 5 star hotel in the world now has a mini bar.

Robert Arnold is Professor of International Hotel Management at the Swiss School of Hospitality-Lenk.