{ Elevated Guest Experience Series: Refillable Toiletries }

At our home, probably much like your own, we already have a lot going on to get ready for the holidays! With guests coming (including my mom for 10 days—hooray!!!!), our annual Glorious Christmas Party to host, and a large house to decorate—including adding & making the decorations for what will be our 11th Christmas tree, woot woot!!—there’s just a lot happening. In fact, just a few minutes ago I was battling it out with our housekeeper over the schedule to get the oven cleaned, floors waxed, windows washed, etc. You know—all the extra crap you have to do to make it look like you’re actually on top of it the whole year, when in reality your oven is rarely clean, your floors don’t always shine, and your windows have plenty of spots. But, at Christmas, everything is…well, glorious!

Anyway, as part of all the preparations, I’ve decided to do a series of posts related to entertaining and hosting in general. This is the first in that series, which I’m calling the “Elevated Guest Experience”. I’ll be sharing very easy and (perhaps, most importantly) inexpensive ways for you to create a five-star experience for your own guests, regardless of if you have a dedicated guest space or if your guests just sleep on your couch. Either way, you can always provide guests with an elevated experience using just a little bit of extra effort!

Doc & I love to host and to entertain friends and family. It’s always so nice for them to have taken the time to come visit us. So, we work very hard to make sure that those staying with us feel like they’re being taken care of and don’t have to worry about a thing while they’re here. We try to think of everything for them—and then some. We’ve been very fortunate to stay in some luxurious hotels and I’ve tried to incorporate some of the things I’ve observed happening there into what our guests experience when they stay with us. It just makes for a much more fun experience and I know it’s what we ourselves appreciate when we stay with others, too. Here, I want to discuss the toiletry situation.

So, I have this thing about staying in other people’s homes: I hate using their half-used toiletries! It can be some of the nicest product you’d ever imagine, but I feel so weird squeezing shampoo out of the same bottle I know they themselves (or 100 other guests) have used. Don’t ask me why. It just is. My simple solution, of course, is just to travel with my own shampoo and body wash. But what about when guests stay with us? Do we just put out mini toiletries we’ve collected along the way? Short answer: no.

Having said that, I do travel quite a bit and have to admit I find myself taking the soaps and mini shampoo bottles from the hotel bathroom whenever I leave. I feel like a mini-toiletry hoarder. But, here’s the thing—I don’t like mini toiletries when it comes to the guest bath. Heck, I don’t typically even use the hotel ones myself (yes, I’m a product snob). So, why I take them after a hotel stay is beyond me. It’s like my little perk for paying for the room, I guess. At any rate, mini toiletries are not what I want to put out for guests. Especially because it’s a bit tacky to have a Hilton-branded shampoo bottle sitting in the shower at home. Guests know full well we aren’t a Hilton and there’s no big ol’ Hilton logo on the front of our house, so why would there be Hilton toiletries in the guest bathroom?!

To solve this, I keep full-sized toiletry bottles in the shower. My trick is that I have back-up bottles stored underneath the sink. After guests leave, I use the back-up bottles to refill the bottles in the shower so that each guest doesn’t feel as if they’re dealing with a half-used product. However, once I got my Cameo, one of the first things I knew I wanted to change was the full-sized bottles themselves. You see, the labels on the bottles didn’t match the bathroom. And that annoyed me greatly. (I know. I need help.) So, after a great deal of searching, I came across some frosted pump bottles (at Target, of all places!) that fit the bill perfectly.

I used my Cameo to cut vinyl labels for the bottles, making all of it coordinate nicely, regardless of what color the bathroom walls or towels may be. This is how they turned out:

Now, what’s funny here is that when I filled the bottles, I reversed the shampoo & conditioner and didn’t even realize it until my sister came to stay with us and pointed it out. So, that’s been changed since taking this picture.

It works beautifully, looks coordinated, and best of all—there’s no half-used bottle for guests to use. In fact, with these bottles, they can clearly see that they’re full. My neurotic self thinks that’s fantastic.

So, a couple of possibilities when you’re looking at your guests’ experience:

1) Forget the mini toiletries. Put full-sized bottles in the shower, refilled after each guest leaves using back-up bottles of the same product. Even if you just use the bottle the product came in instead of putting it in non-branded pump bottles, that alone will make a world of difference. And all for about $5. (I just buy Tresemme products at Target for the guest bath refills.) That’s it—$5!

And, if you have a bunch of mini toiletry bottles already and you don’t want them wasted, you could always use them as the refill for the bottle as it gets emptied until you’ve used them all up. Unless it’s a different color toiletry (i.e., pouring green shampoo into a bottle of white shampoo), nobody’s going to know the difference.

2) Spend a few more dollars to find or make labeled pump dispensers. (Remember to avoid anything with metal so that you don’t have to deal with rust.) My three bottles? Yeah, they cost a total of $12. Love that!

This is a very inexpensive & simple solution that will help your guests leave your home feeling like a million bucks!