Tea Caddies (and the Tea that Goes in Them)

It’s one thing to keep the tea bags in your guest rooms updated. We’re assuming you do that -- remove all the ones with rips in the wrapper, get rid of any with spots or marks on them, in general keep them looking fresh and new.

Now how about the tea caddy you put them in?

Is that looking kind of tired and rundown? Making all the tea bags look bad by association?

In-room tea caddies often aren’t high on hotels’ list of ‘Important Things To Check Every Clean’, so they get overlooked a lot of the time.

But they are important. If they’re dirty, chipped or cracked it does not leave a good impression. True, the guest most likely isn’t going to stomp down to the front desk and demand a new room, but it gets filed away in mind: “Cheap place. Wonder what else is wrong? Hope they changed the sheets.”

And it might just be time to upgrade the overall look of your room.

Black is almost always an appropriate color for your tea caddy. Black or white. Get rid of the red one, the yellow one, unless you’re going for that funky chic, retro look in your rooms.

Bigger is better, since you want to offer a range of tea bags – herbal (more than one option), caffeinated, fair-trade, hot chocolate and instant coffee sachets. Five or six-compartment caddies allow you to present the best selection to the guest’s initial view without them having to riffle through the bags as if they were in a used vinyl records store.

Presenter boxes with hinged lids make for nice presentations. They’re usually marked with a tea producer’s brand, so whether you want to mix brands is your call.

And if you have a fair-trade caddy, then yes, you do need to stock it with fair-trade teas and coffees.