In-room coffee might seem like a small detail, but it can make or break a hotel guest’s morning. Increasingly, guests are leaving their hotel to find better coffee elsewhere, taking potential revenue and brand loyalty with them.
That first cup of the day is a valuable opportunity to boost guest retention by delivering convenience, comfort, and quality. So, what’s the best way to serve it?
Comparing Hotel Bedroom Coffee Options
Offering your guests a delicious coffee from inside their bedroom is a difficult task. You must balance flavour with other factors like convenience, ease of use, cleanliness, and price, to make sure you are investing wisely in your coffee setup.
There are a wide number of options, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The most common 'brew it yourself' options include:
Instant Coffee Sachets
You know the ones - the small sachets of freeze-dried, already brewed coffee that dissolves in hot water. These are cheap and easy to stock but often leave a bad taste, literally and figuratively. Because of mass market manufacturers, instant sachets have a reputation for a certain kind of traditional dark and bitter flavour profile, that usually require milk and/or sugar to temper the bitterness.
These days, a growing number of specialty coffee roasters are exploring creating their own instant sachets, so there are certainly great tasting options available. However, with so much capital investment required for the proper freeze drying process, these small run high quality instant coffees are very expensive to purchase.
Pod Machines (e.g. Nespresso-style pods)
Nespresso-style pod machines have become a household staple over the past decade, and for good reason. They are clean, quick, and intuitive, offering guests a high-quality cup at the push of a button. From a hotel perspective, they’re equally appealing: easy to clean, easy to restock, and they carry a sense of luxury that aligns with premium hospitality experiences.
While some mass-market pods fall short on flavour, the format itself is strong, reliable, scalable, and efficient across all room types.
Coffee Bags
These are pre-portioned pouches of ground coffee, designed to brew like a tea bag. They’re simple, low-mess, and generally compostable, which appeals to environmentally conscious guests. Flavour-wise, they tend to sit somewhere between instant and fresh brew, using coarse pre-ground coffee often sealed in an oxygen free environment to retain some freshness. Acceptable for many, but not exceptional.
They’re also inconsistent, as steep time and water temperature can greatly affect the final cup. Still, they offer a convenient middle ground for hotels wanting to move beyond instant without investing in machines.
Single-Use Pourover Packs
These filter packs sit atop a mug and create a mini pour-over experience, allowing guests to pour hot water through freshly ground coffee. Whilst the idea is solid, the result is often a flavour similar to that of instant or coffee bags.
They require more time and attention, and will be unfamiliar to most travellers who are unfamiliar with pourover coffee. For hotels aiming for a boutique or craft coffee feel, this option certainly offers a unique in-room experience. But if convenience and flavour are important, these pourover packs are too inconsistent and difficult for the average user.
Ground Coffee With a Filter Coffee Machine
This traditional method is familiar in North America and some long-stay properties. It allows guests to brew a full pot of coffee and feels homely for regular travellers. However, it involves more mess, cleaning, and instruction, and can easily result in poor flavour when used incorrectly.
From an operational point of view, the machines are harder to keep clean, maintain and replace, and less suitable for quick turnovers. Relying on pre-ground coffee, the additional effort in creating a drink similar to instant sachets and coffee bags aren't typically worth the drawbacks.
Why Pod Machines Are the Smartest Choice for Hotel Rooms
As a specialty coffee roaster working with hotels across the UK, we’ve tested every in-room coffee format, from instant sachets to filter machines and single-serve pourover packs. Time and again, Nespresso-style pods and pod machines prove to be the best overall solution.
They offer the ideal balance of convenience, price, and guest perception. Guests know how to use them, they’re quick, clean, and consistently deliver a decent cup of coffee which is exactly what travellers want first thing in the morning.
They also offer something different to the other options, which is an espresso-based coffee experience. Rather than large cups of black coffee, pod machines allow users to make shots of espresso, cappuccino or lattes with minimal fuss.
For hotel teams, pod machines are easy to maintain, clean, and restock. There’s no mess, minimal training, and they work across all room types. They’re efficient for staff and reliable for guests.
The flavour and level of drink quality is solely dictated by the type of pod you offer to the guest, which is the only potential drawback of this coffee solution...
The Downside of Mass-Market Coffee Pods
While the price might be ideal, the flavour of mass-market pods often disappoints. Many pods use dark, flat-tasting blends that lack the freshness and complexity today’s coffee drinkers expect. The result? A convenient, but uninspiring experience.
We highly recommend pod systems as a convenient method for allowing guests to self-serve a delicious coffee at any time of day - and luckily, improving the flavour of the coffee is entirely possible.
The Solution: Specialty Third-Party Pods
By switching to your hotel's coffee to pods from a specialty coffee roaster, hotels can offer the same convenience with significantly better flavour.
These 3rd party pods are compatible with standard Nespresso machines but use high-quality, ethically sourced beans, roasted fresh for peak flavour. Your guests get a richer, more enjoyable cup without sacrificing ease of use, and your hotel delivers a better experience with minimal operational change.
When selecting your hotel's coffee supplier, make sure to consider whether they are able to support with a high quality Nespresso-style pod to provide a premium in-room coffee experience.
Flavour and Function, Delivered by Bridge Coffee Roasters
At Bridge Coffee Roasters, we’ve created Nespresso-compatible pods specifically designed for hotels. Our specialty pods offer:
Outstanding flavour that rivals a café-quality cup.Consistent, mess-free preparation to support your team.
Flexible volume and flavour options, tailored to your guest profile.
Specialty Coffee Pods for your Hotel
Whether you’re running a boutique hotel or managing a national chain, our pods help you elevate your in-room hotel coffee with minimal effort, and no compromise on taste.
Discover the easiest way to deliver better coffee in every room. Get in touch with Bridge Coffee Roasters today.
.