No thank you. I Do Not Require a Mini Bar…

My hubby and I recently went to Vegas for a conference. We left the airport, grabbed a cab, and then asked the cab driver to stop at the closest beer store. It’s much cheaper to have your own supplies than to pay at the bars. Yes, I understand that if you gamble the drinks are free, but the waitresses only come around about once an hour! Anyway, we stocked up for the week and then went to check into the hotel. We stayed at the Paris hotel. It was a lovely hotel and we were quite pleased with the accomodations. Believe it or not, the only thing that was frustrating was the mini bar in our room.

Unbeknownst to us, the only fridge in the room was the mini bar. I’ve traveled a bit and typically the min bar service comes in daily and does a tally of the objects in the fridge. If today’s tally does not match yesterday’s tally you’ve obviously consumed something in the fridge. This mini bar was different. You see,  we needed a place to store the beer we purchased so we opened the mini bar and cleared out the first shelf for our stuff. We moved all of the liquor bottles to the bottom shelf.

No big deal, right?

WRONG! Not 5 minutes later the front desk alerts us to a $400 charge on our room bill. Wondering how we consumed so much alcohol in a matter of mintues they decided to check in with us. This mini bar was sensor activated! So when a bottle was moved (consumed or not) it was counted as having been consumed. Since we moved EVERYTHING in the fridge we were charged for the entire contents of the fridge!

Holy crap!

So the hotel sent up some help right away. We managed to restore order to the mini bar but still had no place to store our beer. The hotel usually charges $25 per day to rent a fridge, but because of the midhap we had earlier with the mini bar, they decided to comp us on use of the fridge. A quick 30 minutes later we had a somewhat beaten, though working fridge for which to place the puchased beers.

The worst part was that this was a company trip so the $400 charge showed up on the bill. Granted, they removed the charge at the end, but what is normally a one page hotel receipt ended up being an 8 page hotel receipt, that I had to include with my expense report. I was so embarrassed.

And after all of that I really didn’t need a mini bar…

I need no mini bar!