Coffee and tea service, specifically herbal tea, as an in-room wellness amenity represents an area where there’s a strong opportunity for hotels to improve their presentation.
This guestroom feature is easily accessible for all hotel categories due to low per-unit costs and scalable due to minimal labor inputs, thus representing a great entry to the wellness market.
A hotel’s tea presentation cannot exist in isolation, though, and is best approached as part of a concerted effort to enhance the room’s wellness branding through a cluster of sleep or health-focused amenities.
Those who know me know that I’m a huge pundit for daily herbal tea consumption as a way to slowly improve one’s health. Practicing what I preach, those who’ve worked with me know that I’m a huge advocate for differentiating a hotel’s tea and coffee service, both as part of an on-prem dining experience and within the guestroom.
We’ll get into some of the nerdy biochemistry underpinning herbal tea’s health benefits at the end. But from the title, what’s most important for hoteliers to note is that, from the perspective of cost per unit, there’s perhaps no better way to improve the in-room guest experience and create a scalable, wellness-oriented point of differentiation than to roll out an enhanced coffee and tea amenity.
Sadly, for self-proclaimed tea-holics such as myself, most hotels are not differentiated enough in this particular aspect of their operations. Mug half full, this opens the doors for trendsetting brands to use the in-room tea amenity to ramp up room revenues, albeit in a way that isn’t necessarily apples-to-apples comparable.
Guardrails for the Discussion Ahead
One could say that the history of modern hotels is also the history of the tea and coffee trade. Indeed, numerous hotels on multiple continents can note their contributions to stewarding these perky beverages onto the world stage. Barring the writing of a (GPT-aided) 600-page monograph to illustrate this coevolutionary heritage, we need a framework in place to focus what’s ahead and, hopefully, get the argument under 3,000 words.
First, let’s define herbal tea. This comprises anything and everything derived from plants, their flowers as well as fungi (not just herbs) that have nutritionally beneficial properties. The exception for today’s discussion are those teas that are caffeinated or ergogenic through some other means. Most notably, even though they are technically ‘herbal’, let’s exclude green, matcha or white tea and their fermented black, oolong or pu’er versions (all derived from the Camellia sinensis shrub) as well as others like cascara (coffee cherry tea), yerba maté and guarana.
Second, we are laser-focused on the in-room experience here. Especially at the luxury end, innumerable hotels already have exquisite coffee bars and tea services in their restaurants as well as popular, lavish and highly Instagrammable afternoon tea service experiences that are steeped (pun intended) in the history of the hotel brand as well as its environs.
Three refined brand examples of this are Langham, Mandarin Oriental and Raffles, which all beautifully blend their British commercial influences with East Asian and Southeast Asian hospitality grandeur. For a specific property reference of what’s possible at the ultraluxury level to help transform a morning or afternoon tea service into its own earned and social media vehicle, the one that takes the coffeecake is none other than the Raffles Singapore which does high tea in The Grand Lobby.
Third, let’s leave coffee out of it (mostly). In-room coffee service is nowadays most commonly ‘solved’ by providing a Nespresso or Keurig machine. And these are hard to beat for good reason – easy to use, well-understood by customers as quality brands, cheap on a wholesale per-unit basis, and scalable for both frictionless procurement as well as daily housekeeping operations.
Caffeinated tea and herbal teas have much more flexibility in design (ingredients and packaging) over the abovementioned coffee pods because all that’s needed is a cup of boiling water, and thus they are prime territory for innovation. But a fourth guardrail to mention is that we are only looking at the individually packaged tea bags and not any sort of room service addition or turndown amenity, because both of which are labor-intensive and not universally applicable for most hotel categories.
Fifth and finally, because we are looking at a ‘wellness amenity’, the focus from here out is strictly on in-room herbal teas. This isn’t to say that green tea or others aren’t good for the health (the exact opposite is true, such as the compound EGCG in green tea), but that the noncaffeinated blends aren’t getting enough attention for their potent health benefits, particularly in light of all the recent buzz around sleep tourism and sleep-focused room categories.
The Opportunity for Differentiation
From the opener, you may sense that I’m none too pleased with the degree of innovation that most hotels are doing with respect to in-room herbal teas. With most hotel stays, when I arrive in the room, I’m continually deflated by the standardized, and generally boring, presentation of four tea bags, typically one green, one black or earl grey and two basic herbal mixes (mint and chamomile are most common, although I’ve seen some Lipton fruit blends at midscale properties).
Many hotels claim to be luxury; many claim to be champions of wellness. And yet, I still see the same suppliers and the same homogenized tea services no matter the brand. The only things that really change as you move up the chain scale are that the packaging becomes more artistic and some brands also use biodegradable packaging materials. In short, I’m not ‘wowed’; the in-room tea service registers as only passable or satisfactory, which doesn’t bode well for imprinting in one’s memory as a contributor to a great onsite stay.
In sum, hotels are missing the mark, but therein lies a huge opportunity for a win-win. Because of the void of brands that are doing this in a memorable way, it makes it all the easier for you, the bold hotelier who actually has time to read my verbose LinkedIn articles, to set up a remarkable in-room herbal tea amenity.
Caveat emptor: this won’t be a panacea. But nevertheless, it can be a factor towards repositioning a room category, or all rooms, in light of the ever-growing demand for hotel wellness products. And because we are talking about wellness, the second win comes through in that herbal tea is actually really, really healthy (when consumed habitually), so you are verifiably helping people feel better while travel…which is the ultimate goal of hospitality, right?
The Gold Standard of In-Room Coffee and Tea Service
Let’s start with an example of what success looks like so that you can get a visual to start putting the pieces together for your own brand, from marginally increased spend on this amenity through to unique value proposition that justifies higher nightly rates.
In my mind and from the perspective of a North American-based luxury hotel consultant, the gold standard for coffee and tea service is none other than the Equinox Hotel New York, a five-star, 212-key property in the ultramodern Hudson Yards neighborhood that has firmly established itself as a trendsetter in the luxury sleep, fitness and wellness-secondary travel.
Note that ‘wellness-secondary’ is defined as travelers who are visiting a destination for a purpose other than wellness but they still want to remain healthy while going about their business. This is a fast-growing traveler psychographic that Equinox CEO Chris Norton describes under the banner term of ‘high-performance living’.
These are people that are physically active, ambitious, often working in cognitively demanding roles and who take the phrase ‘health is wealth’ seriously. Such guests are willing to spend significantly more per night to guarantee quality sleep because they intrinsically understand the relationship between good rest and being 100% the next day in order to maximize their time while abroad.
With all the hyper around sleep tourism these days, there are plenty of other hotel brands that are keenly focused on developing upgraded sleep programs to appeal to this customer mindset, but for now let’s focus on what makes said gold standard so shiny and…golden.
First, the standardized Nespresso coffee amenity has an uncommon addition that I absolutely love: coconut collagen coffee creamer (say that five times fast). Not strictly vegan as often the manufacturer’s collagen is derived from animal sources, what’s critical to understand is that approximately 30% of a human’s protein is comprised of collagen peptide structures, and these tissues are in constant turnover. There is mounting evidence that we need a continuous supply of collagen peptides and amino acids (glycine, proline and hydroxyproline) in order to adequately facilitate this turnover and stave off age-related bodily decline.
And yet, I doubt the majority of us are willing to bring along some extra collagen when we travel, lest we get stopped by airport security for carrying a plastic bag of suspicious, white powder. It behooves the hotel to supply a small dose for us to imbibe in between meals.
Second and the pièce de résistance, the Equinox Hotel’s in-room tea service deserves acclaim for its functional yet funky presentation. See the image below which I took during my first stay at this property (although they may have updated this presentation since):
The big point to make here is that they are selling benefits and not features, or put another way, desired outcomes (mood shifts and wellbeing results) and not the technical specifications (the exact ingredients in each blend, which are listed on the back). The simple font types and pantone-esque color coding are nice touches, too.
Is this chic tea presentation enough to drive an ADR that’s touching $1,000? Hardly. But it nevertheless is an important part of their minibar service, for which the Equinox Hotel has branded their bespoke offering as the RoomBar. This includes the aforementioned teas and collagen creamer as well as a bevy of keto-friendly snacks, liposomal vitamin pouches from Cymbiotika, green juice shots, classy cocktail mixes from a West Village purveyor, a smattering of luxury cosmetic products and plenty more.
And even then, the RoomBar is but one incredible feature that differentiates the rooms at the Equinox Hotel. It’s a luxury brand, so the FF&E is off the charts amazing, dominated by dark woods, marble, blackened fixtures and other sound-dampening materials to give guests peace of mind (tagline: cool, dark, quiet).
Next, there’s a layer of seamless, invisible technology wherein all light controls are easily accessible from a bedside tablet; there are blackout drapes; and in case you have nocturia, the ring lights around the perimeter of the bedframe are motion-activated so that you don’t need to find a light switch when you swing your legs off the mattress at 3am to go pee. Finally, other features round out this sleep-centric guestroom theme like the dark chocolate-covered tart cherries turndown service, stylishly delivered in a smoking cloche. I highly recommend you spend a night here when next in the Big Apple to understand how all these pieces fit.
To close this section, the takeaway is that it’s doubtful that any single guest will ever verbalize the sentence, “The Equinox Hotel has the best in-room tea amenity in Manhattan and that’s the specific reason why I’m willing to pay a premium to book a room there.” And yet, it’s an integral part of the broader story where the sum (ability to command an above-market ADR) ends up greater than the parts (cost of each wellness-oriented room feature).
Quantifying Tea Programs in Terms of Relative Value Units
There’s an important term in healthcare administration that serves my argumentation quite well here. For a basic description of a relative value unit (RVU), Google’s generative search does a great job, so let’s just use that: a ‘value’ assigned to a medical service or procedure that reflects the cost and effort involved in providing it. In other words, RVUs are a method of deriving a universal quantification for the ROI from all the various activities that medical professionals perform from basic clerical work right up to neurosurgery. You need a common metric in order to evaluate reimbursements as well as optimize for future value.
I put value in quotations above because it is more than just cost. If we were to measure the RVU of a hotel’s tea service, it would not just be the cost per tea bag but also aspects like:
- Impact on the guest’s perception of the hotel experience in order to drive word of mouth, social media engagement, return visits, more demand and higher rates
- Ability to differentiate the brand for heightened customer awareness from earned media through to paid advertising and channel shift to direct
- Contribution to wellness-driven brand storytelling that can drive awareness or boost revenues through an upgraded room category
- Actual health benefits of the herbal tea so that the guests’ desired outcomes of wellbeing and vitality are more likely to be attained
These four value-adds are difficult to measure with statistical certainty, but they are nevertheless there. Instead, let’s just focus purely on costs in a loose(leaf) manner.
With rounded figures, suppose each tea bag costs $0.20, your SOP dictates four per room per occupied room night, you allow for free extras to guests at an assumed average dispensation of four extra tea bags per every four room nights (essentially one extra per occupied room night) and the cost of stocking or restocking is $2 (calculated back of napkin as $40 per hour for a senior housekeeper with three minutes allocated to clean and stock the coffee and tea amenity). Tallied, your total cost is $3 per occupied room night.
Let’s next say that you decide to upgrade this amenity by going with a high-end supplier and allocate eight tea bags to the amenity, altogether doubling your cost per occupied room night. That still is only $6 for what can potentially be a key component of a strategic wellness repositioning. By comparison, just think about the FF&E capex requirements in the tens of thousands per room to reposition them into a wellness category.
Due to its nominal quantity, such a cost increase ($3) can easily be paid forward to even the most price-sensitive consumer or, with the right marketing oomph, be expressed as part of a value-added package to command double digits more in rate. Put in healthcare terms, in-room tea amenities have a flashing greenlight of an RVU.
Why Herbal Tea?
Herbal tea represents one of the best delivery mechanisms for remedies. And unlike their caffeinated cousins, they can be taken at any time, day or night. They are often taken on an empty stomach for faster absorption into the bloodstream; the heated liquid also aids in this respect. Moreover, because we are dealing with natural herbs and not pharmaceuticals, the former pertain to very low concentrations of a bioactive compound that’s often balanced or ‘matrixed’ alongside one or multiple synergistic molecules.
Most hotels can do wonders with their green and black tea allotments per occupied room per night. However, the opportunity that’s specific for herbal teas is that there are so many different healthy ingredients to choose from. This means that hotels can easily carve out their own custom blends and their own seasonal editions as part of a product line, or they can look to white label or cobrand with a reputable supplier.
To give you a sense of the permutations available to you, here’s an abbreviated list of some of the ingredients (in alphabetical order) that are at your disposal when crafting your own ‘sleepy tea’, ‘daily detox’ or ‘holiday evening blend’ herbal tea: anise, ashwagandha, black pepper, burdock root, butterfly pea, calendula, cardamom, chamomile, cinnamon, cornflower, dandelion root, dried cranberry, dried elderberry, echinacea, eucalyptus leaf, ginger, hibiscus, jiaogulan, juniper berries, lemon balm, lemon peel, lemongrass, licorice root, milk thistle, mint, moringa, mullein, olive leaf, orange peel, passionflower, peppermint, raspberry leaf, reishi, rooibos, rose petal, rosemary, sage, schisandra, sea buckthorn, skullcap, stinging nettle, turmeric and valerian root.
My Own Sleepy Tea Blend
You’ve made it this far, so as a token of my appreciation, I’m now going to give you my custom sleepy tea blend that I’ve been honing for several years now, to show you my thought process in crafting a blend and for you to make back at home.
The mixture brings together a variety of common and esoteric bioactive ingredients that work across a myriad of physiological pathways to help with both sleep onset and sleep elongation, as well as increase bodily repair during the first third of sleep – deep sleep, slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep, depending on how you’re defining it.
Many of these are readily available in stores or online at the Everything Store, or they can be grown in your garden for maximal potency. I stick with eight because any more added to the cocktail and you likely wouldn’t get enough of each within a single cup (not to mention some potentially adverse biochemical interactions):
1. Chamomile: A commonly available flower that is well-regarded for its sleep onset potential. The plant is also the highest by weight in apigenin, a molecule that has some very promising longevity research behind it.
2. Lavender: Also well-known for its sleep-onset effects, this flower acts via a different physiological pathway than chamomile, with the health benefits largely attributed to the various terpenes such as linalool and camphor.
3. Anise Seed: This one I added after a Lebanese hotelier friend told me about how his nonagenarian grandmother stands by it, while it’s also highly used in Ayurveda. The active molecule that’s being studied here is anethole which also gives the skunky smell to fennel.
4. Rosemary: While this dried leaf here has some overlapping terpenes with lavender, this culinary mainstay is singled out for rosmarinic acid which is a weak allosteric GABA-A receptor agonist as well as GABA-T enzyme inhibitor, thus aiding in sleep elongation.
5. Rooibos: Getting in some red pigments for a bit of flavonoids.
6. Dried Hawthorn Berries: Getting some blue-purple anthocyanins to complement the red in rooibos, in addition to very minor amounts of vitamin E and beta-carotene.
7. Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat: A rare find, this one is lauded for its high concentrations of 2-hydroxybenzylamine (2-HOBA) that can bind to oxidized fats to reduce inflammation.
8. Strawberry Leaf: Besides growing your own and harvesting the leaves, this can be derived from all the leftover food waste in the kitchen when making fruit salads. While strawberries are famous for their fisetin (senolytic that kills zombie cells) and myricetin (xanthine oxidase inhibitor to reduce uric acid), the leave has a substantial amount of ellagic acid which is a precursor to Urolithin A, a prominent mitochondrial booster.
Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. - Hotel Strategist, Industry Pundit, Veteran Marketer, and Public Speaker. Adam Mogelonsky, is the chief technologist of the company, Adam has a broad understanding of the complexities of the hotel tech stack as well as the vendors who are paving the way for increased labor efficiencies and new revenue growth opportunities.
Leveraging over 40 years working in hospitality, Hotel Mogel Consulting helps both hotel owners maximize property performance and technology vendors navigate the industry's entry barriers to realize financial success. Visit our contact page to start the conversation.
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