Five Things To Do With Your Hotel SWAG
If you bring all your own toiletries, then those little bottles of shampoo and bars of soap are pretty much useless, right? Wrong! They are your hotel-given right and you stuff them into your suitcase every day before you let housekeeping tidy up because they are one of the benefits of staying in a hotel. You end up coming home with a suitcase full of dirty clothes and tiny bottles. What do you do with them?
Use Them: In the privacy of your own home, you can use them. Lots of hotels have teamed up with famous toiletry brands, so it’s a chance to try out a new shampoo without risk. Try them on a weekend or any other day that it’s not essential that you look perfect and see if the shampoo works with your hair.
Empty Out The Bottles And Fill Them With YOUR Stuff: If you need a small bottle of your favorite hand lotion in your purse, the hotel SWAG bottles are ideal. The bottles are also good for filling with your favorite products and taking with you in your toiletry bag. I covered how to do this in detail here: Travel Size Your Way.
Give Them To Children: Kids love things that seem like they were made for them. I remember as a child that my grandpa would come home with the hotel SWAG from his business trips. I thought those little bottles were made for me because they looked just like normal shampoo bottles, just smaller. I especially loved the facial soaps because I thought they were just like a normal bar of soap, but it was small enough to fit into MY hands.
Keep Them For Guests: When you have guests visit, you can give them to your guest or leave them in your guest bathroom (I used to have one of those, but now, we all share). You can pretend like you’re a little hotel.
Give Them To A Homeless Shelter: My last Hotel SWAG pile went to our local homeless shelter right after we had a surge of refugees because of Hurricane Katrina. Our homeless shelter asked for personal hygiene supplies because so many people were without ANYTHING, even soap. Here is a directory: Homeless Shelters. You can find your nearest shelter and ask if they need toiletries.
I’m sending my huge pile off to Crossroads Urban Center here in Utah, but I wanted to take photos of it all before I did. There is something fun about hotel SWAG and I didn’t want to lose that fun without a way to remember it.