To snack or not to snack? Hotel guests speak out about mini-bars

There are two kinds of hotel guests in this world: Those who dip into the mini-bar and those who don't.

After reading the 74 comments on Tuesday's post, " Do mini-bar snack sales reflect economic times ," it looks like the majority "don't."

But before I highlight their comments, let me first give a shout out to the mostly silent mini-bar-snack-buying community: There are enough of you out there, otherwise hotels wouldn't spend money buying the small refrigerators, paying for their electricity tab and stocking them with $7 bottles of water, $3 bags of M&Ms, $5 cans of Pringles and other overpriced stuff.

USA TODAY reader Coconutz82 likely speaks for many of the snackers out there.

The only time "I've

Here's what the majority of readers who wrote in had to say:

The most-recommended comment  - with 31 reader recommendations - came from ComeOnPeople , a proud mini-bar abstainer. He wrote:

"The only reason in this world I'd ever get anything out of a mini bar would be if I had a 15 hour flight, they served no food, every eatery in the airport or the way to the hotel and in the hotel was closed and room service was not available and every store/eatery was going to be closed the next day," he wrote. "I'm not cheap and gladly pay top price if its something I want, but paying $3.50+ for a 12 oz soft drink is way too much for me.

Reader MishMish echoed those thoughts, writing that "it never mattered to me how much money I had or what the economy was doing- I always travel cheap and I never eat or drink anything from the minibar."

Reader seahurst prefers to take a bagful of nuts or food bars to snack on instead of running up a mini-bar bill. "It takes about the same time to do this as tossing in your toothbrush."

Bahama Pundit: Bahamas Hotel Corporation—Relic of Past Corruption

by las

Both men are emblematic of a discredited legacy. Smith was a PLP cabinet minister and Exuma MP when Colombian gangsters used his constituency with impunity as a smuggling base. He figured prominently in the 1984 commission of inquiry into drug corruption, and was resurrected as the Hotel Corporation's chairman during the PLP's last term. Christie was fired from the PLP cabinet when it was rumoured that he and fellow minister Hubert Ingraham intended to resign over drug trafficking, but he soon returned to the fold. And he secured his succession to the PLP throne by defending former Hotel Corporation chairman Sir Lynden Pindling during the 1993 commission of inquiry into corruption and incompetence. The Corporation's 1974 enabling legislation gave it the power to "carry out any undertakings needed to achieve its purposes". And PLP leaders used it as a gigantic slush fund for decades, wasting hundreds of millions in public funds. That's why it is so remarkable that Smith and Christie can continue to say with a straight face that the Corporation has "proven beneficial" to the Bahamas and can still play a "constructive role" in tourism. Let's go back to the summer of 1974 when it all began. The Arab oil embargo had produced a sharp recession in the US, which led to a downturn in travel to the Bahamas. Faced with a loss of tourism jobs for the first time in a generation, the government stepped in to buy three failing hotels on Cable Beach - the Ambassador, Emerald and Balmoral Beach - for a total of $20 million. But things went downhill from the start. The board was packed with PLP loyalists and failed to produce financial statements for the first few years. In 1976 more millions were spent to buy the Cable Beach golf course and three hotels in Freeport. And by the end of the decade the Corporation was in "grave financial difficulties" and the subject of heated disputes in parliament. "At the outset costs were totally ignored...and a sum of $7 million was wasted on (the) initial phase...This attitude continued throughout the life of the project, and no proper feasibility study was ever carried out...The tendering process was not properly handled...The hotel could not conceivably support a development cost of $100 million...But the chairman continued to insist that the project had to go forward regardless of whether it was viable or not." Unfazed, the Corporation continued on its acquisition spree. In 1985 it bought the 20-room Lighthouse Club at Fresh Creek, Andros (developed by Axel Wenner-Gren in the 1950s) along with thousands of acres of vacant land on Andros and Eleuthera. The following year it acquired the Freeport Holiday Inn, and went on to build a multi-million-dollar headquarters building on Cable Beach, described as "a magnificent monument and landmark." According to then chairman Paul Adderley, "the Bahamian people, through the Hotel Corporation, ought to be owners of, and initiators of, touristic development in the Bahamas." He later announced with much fanfare a Family Island Development Plan that called for the Hotel Corporation to build small modular resorts on Andros, Eleuthera and Exuma. His grandiose plan went exactly nowhere - except for the little-known Las Palmas Hotel on Andros. Las Palmas (now known as the Emerald Palms) was the most fascinating example of the Corporation's crookedness. Built in the 1960s, it was acquired in 1975 by Pindling's chief crony, Everette Bannister, with money from fugitive American swindler Robert Vesco. Las Palmas was the prime minister's base camp whenever he was in his Mangrove Cay constituency. And from 1976 to 1984 it was managed by Resorts International as a favour to Pindling, who was given a cottage at the resort. In 1986 Mangrove Cay resident Benjamin Forbes bought the hotel with a $600,000 loan from the Bahamas Development Bank, and none of his own money. When Forbes defaulted, the Hotel Corporation (in the person of CEO Baltron Bethel) stepped in to buy Las Palmas for $650,000, plus an extra $34,000 for Forbes. The Corporation then spent $1.6 million to renovate the hotel (as well as Pindling's cottage). By 1992 - even though industry conditions were probably worse than they were in 1974 - the emphasis was on getting out of the hotel business in order to stem the country's mounting financial losses. The hotels were up for sale even before the government changed, but there was little interest until the new Ingraham administration struck an investment deal with Sol Kerzner. In the mid-90s three hotels in Freeport and two in Nassau were sold off. Las Palmas lingered until 2000, and the Cable Beach Hotel remained in government hands until it was acquired by Baha Mar in 2005.

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