Pet Peeve: Tea in hotel rooms

Nothing is more relaxing than a nice cup of tea when you wake up and before you go to bed as a tea affinado. However as I frequently stay in hotel rooms for work, I am often struggling to get my tea fix as the facilities in the room are often below par, especially since the rise of the Nexpresso machines (thanks George)… 

And it is so simple, with these 3 simple requirements below hotels can make a tea drinkers stay truly enjoyable

1. Water boiler: preferably a regular water boiler that gets the water up to 100c to make a good cup of black tea
2. A large mug or cup: a tea bag need to swim
3. Tea selection: a nice choice of black, green and herbals 

However most hotels fail in all 3 requirements of which item 1 is absolutely the worst. With the rising popularity of Nespresso, hotels often only provide a sleek looking Nespresso machine (or knock-off). These machine cannot boil water and often do not enable the production of hot water at all so even making green or herbal tea – which requires hot not boiling water – is not possible. Or the nuzzle is placed in such away you can only get amounts into a small cup with a coffee flavour. So there you are in a 5 star hotel – even with bringing your own cup and tea bags (see below) – no option to make an evening or morning cup of tea.

So here is my plea to all hotels: provide a decent normal water boiler in your room for the tea affinados

On to requirement 2. Most hotels cater to coffee drinkers and standard coffee cups barely fit a tea bag, let alone leave room for it to swim. And those even smaller Nexpresso cups do not even fit a tea bag. 

And the last requirement: a good selection of teas. Often they only provide a cheap version of black tea or a large variety of pickwick fruit teas which might have been there for 5+ years already. Meanwhile these cheap abominations are lying next Nespresso cups that costs 5 times more than a good quality tea bag. And here we encounter the catch 22: if the tea hotels provide is so crap, nobody drinks it and as a result hotels think providing better tea is not needed as nobody is drinking it anyway…

To be fair some hotels do provide a good selection of teas: I have seen hotel rooms with a decent selection of Damman or Mariage Frères teas though sometimes with a cups that are too small or no water boiler… 

Coming up hotel room tea station reviews!