It's a reflex response: switch on the lights, check out the bathroom, put your luggage down, bounce on the bed, turn your head towards the hotel telly and "Ooh, there's a minibar. And wow, it has - a cold tin of olives?"
Reality dawns with the paper sledgehammer that is the price list. You feel mugged. You pledge never to spend £5 on a small bottle of Carlsberg when you can grab a crate of beer in the corner shop for five pfennigs. Ever!
But minibars are cruel. No matter how hard you try, you will always raid the evil little two-shelf fridge, usually late at night. And hotels know it.
According to research by Hotels.com across eight European countries - UK, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, France, Norway, Sweden and Germany - 46% of us succumb to the monster minibar. Brits spend £526m a year on minibars alone, the equivalent bailout of a small bank - or four miniatures of Scotch and a chocolate peanut bar.
The average Briton's minibar spend per break is £15.44, £2 down on 2007 (must be the recession, glad to see thrift has returned). The worst offenders are the Irish, spending £22 per break, according to the poll, with the Norwegians the most frugal at £10. (That seems odd - if you hail from a country where a beer is £8, you'd view a minibar booze a bargain.)
Minibars are like having your own personal Ryanair trolley in your room, without the surly service, rattling wheels and time-consuming currency conversions. And, like a Ryanair trolley, a minibar stocks all manner of unhealthy, unsatisfying snacks and drinks at unwelcome prices. And because few of us feel comfortable paying minibar prices, we invent ways to snooker it. It's called "minibar-meddling", apparently.
One in 10 Brits admitted to a "minibar meddle" in the survey: buying similar drinks in the corner shop to cheekily restock what we've necked the night before. That is easier said than done, however. Minibar products are sometimes outsized - more usually undersized (they have to be small to fit in) and unavailable in the local shop. The brands are often international, too expensive for many local shops.
In Kiev, and on a tight budget, I went one better, and popped out to load up on snacks and drink, emptying the overpriced minibar of branded western products and replacing it with my own, local, cheaper comfort fodder. Sixty per cent of us do that, says Hotels.com. The next day the maid helpfully made my bed, cleaned the bathroom, and then very kindly emptied the fridge of all my drink and replaced it with all the hotel's drink. My beer was warm, their's was cold. One-nil! So I put them back again. One-one! This tiring game of fill, empty, refill went on each day for four days until I checked out.
We can blame minibars on the German firm Siegas, which introduced the first refrigerated bar in the early 1960s. The true pioneer (read culprit), however, was the Hong Kong Hilton, which installed small fridges in each room, with two drinks of every type on a small shelf to be given away free to guests (ah, the golden days of travel).
The cost proved prohibitive until some canny marketing jobsworth - someone who should be hunted down and bludgeoned to death with a small fridge and a can of olives - worked out a billing system for each room's usage. The result? A spectacular 500% rise over normal room service sales. Apparently, it raised the bottom line profit by 5%. All the Hiltons copied it, and so did other international chains.
Which is where we are today, except hotels are dreaming up more ways to fleece the guest. Some stock condoms, vibrators and even lubrication - "They've got vibrators and lube in K West in Shepherd's Bush," says my friend Paul. The three-star Catalina Hotel and Beach Club in Miami has a "pimp my fridge" option, "enabling guests to order various personalised minibars", including the 'Get It On Minibar' which includes a Barry White CD, edible body paint, Champagne and whipped cream."
There are even "minibar happy hours". The five-star Jumeirah Lowndes Hotel in Knightsbridge offers 30% off between 10pm and midnight.
Perhaps the best way to flog overpriced minibar goodies is to put stuff in it we actually want. (No tinned nuts, more fresh sarnies!) Hotels.com says for men that means more beer (yawn - 60%) and, oddly, massage oils (25%); while women are more concerned with chocolate bars (yawn again - 43%) and a good book or magazine (38%). Erm, book? Magazine? In a fridge?
Perhaps there is nothing next. Some hotels simply don't restock the minibars. Rare, I know. But common in stag do cities and aircrew hotels, apparently.
One friend turned up late to a hotel in Amsterdam only to find the minibar totally empty - not even water or OJ, she says. "It was an airline crew hotel, and experience had shown that air crews couldn't be trusted not to get totally larrupped the night before a flight... so the airline instructed the hotel to clear out ALL the minibars."
Cheap, very cheap.
