Why You Should Always Order Breakfast in Your Room When Traveling on Business
By the end of this year, I will be spending more than half of my time traveling, most often in hotel rooms. So I worked out a little … routine. The first thing I do when I check into a hotel room after drinking all the free bottles of water right away (flight dehydration is real!) Fill up the door hanger for breakfast in my room in the morning, requiring it to arrive in about an hour before I have to leave the hotel in the morning. I do this first because I will probably be late and I don’t want to risk forgetting to fill it out later.
There was a time when I considered ordering room service a luxury that only rich lazy people did, but it became a staple for me for a number of reasons:
Food alarm
While you can of course open the door in your pajamas to pick up room service, I’m not going to do that. I don’t need to be in full make-up, ready to walk out the door to do room service, but I do want to be relatively decently dressed.
Knowing that my balls are arriving at 7:30 AM means that I will resist the urge to hit the Snooze button again when my alarm goes off at 7 AM, and instead actually get out of bed and shower before giving birth.
The deadline is right for me. If he wasn’t there, I would probably take a nap 15 minutes before I actually had to leave. Now, not only have I not had breakfast, but have not yet taken a shower and rush out the door. Having a sort of food alarm gets me going at a decent hour, which gives me a much more leisurely morning.
Do you eat breakfast
You know the old saying, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” I don’t know if I buy this all the time, but if you travel for work and are in meetings all day, you will be happy to have eggs delivered and toast at 11am. Breakfast delivery means you actually eat before you hit the road.
Talkative colleagues can be avoided
I’m not a morning person. Inevitably, when I try to head to a hotel restaurant for breakfast, I run into one, if not several, other people attending the same conference or working as part of the same group. These people are big and I would love to have a beer with them in the evening, but over a cup of coffee at 7 am I want to talk to absolutely no one. When you go to a hotel restaurant, you open yourself up to these people wanting to chat, or worse, wanting to sit with you and have breakfast together. Breakfast in your room will give you a restful breakfast with yourself (if that’s what you like) and it’s great.
Do some work
I always feel a little uncomfortable pulling out my laptop in a hotel restaurant, but there is no one in my room who cares. I find breakfast time to be a great time to get the morning news and answer emails, which is much easier to do in my (literal) bed than on the street.
Obviously, if you’re on vacation and can afford a leisurely breakfast, be sure to head to a hotel restaurant (or even a nearby restaurant) for breakfast. If you are traveling on schedule, I highly recommend trying the room service breakfast. You will pay a tiny premium for the service (usually around $ 5-10, depending on the quality of your hotel), but it’s worth it.