Costeau: Why Can’t You Get a Decent Cup of Coffee in a 5-star Hotel?

Costeau

If you want to understand the current condition of hotel coffee, the very last thing you should do is read the gilded menu descriptions or listen to the confident proclamations of concierges. These are usually self-serving, the prose as frothy as the cappuccinos, and the promises as empty as the flavor.

The modern luxury hotel is a marvel of consistency. The sheets will be Egyptian cotton, the toiletries will be French, and the coffee will be abysmal. It is one of life’s great paradoxes that institutions willing to spend thousands on a single chandelier cannot seem to produce a decent cup of coffee. The establishments that pride themselves on attention to detail mysteriously abandon all standards when it comes to what is arguably the world’s most popular beverage.

Amir Gehl is the founder of Difference Coffee – a coffee which I can testify is beautifully presented and absolutely delicious. Gehl is also something of a caffeine evangelist, puts it bluntly: “Hotels are spending fortunes on their interiors, their furnishings, their amenities. But then they serve coffee that tastes like it was made in a prison canteen.”

This is not hyperbole. I have stayed in hotels where the bathroom marble was imported from Carrara, the pillows were goose down, and the coffee tasted like it had been brewed through an old sock. Sometimes, indeed, it appears to have been brewed several hours before and kept warm on a hot plate – a practice that would make any coffee connoisseur weep into their perfectly tamped espresso.

The issue, it seems, is partly one of priorities. Alix White of the Seren Collection offers rare insight from the hotel side: “Coffee is often an afterthought for hotels, even at the luxury end. It’s viewed as a necessary amenity rather than an opportunity to impress.”
White continues: “Many hotels operate on thin margins in food and beverage. Coffee gets grouped with other breakfast items rather than being seen as a signature experience.”

But this hardly explains the disconnect. After all, these are establishments that will happily charge you £8 for a bottle of water with a fancy French name. They will offer pillow menus with more options than a car configurator. Yet somehow, the coffee – a product that millions of people consume daily with religious devotion – is relegated to an afterthought.

Gehl is particularly scathing about hotel room coffee. “Those little sachets of freeze-dried granules? They wouldn’t pass muster in a youth hostel, let alone a five-star hotel. It’s as if the hospitality industry collectively decided that coffee doesn’t matter.”
The bitter irony is that we are living in what coffee experts call the “third wave” – a renaissance of specialty coffee where provenance, processing, and preparation are given the same reverence as fine wine. The average high street now boasts independent cafés where baristas can tell you not just the country but the specific farm where your beans were grown. Meanwhile, many luxury hotels are still serving coffee that would make instant look sophisticated.

White acknowledges this disparity: “There’s been a real shift in consumer expectations around coffee in the last decade. Many hotels haven’t caught up to what people experience in good cafés or even at home.”

The solution seems obvious: treat coffee with the same seriousness as other luxury offerings. Some forward-thinking establishments have begun to do just that, partnering with specialty roasters and investing in proper training and equipment.

“It’s not even particularly expensive to do it right,” Gehl insists. “Good beans, proper storage, well-maintained equipment, and trained staff – it’s the same formula for success that applies to everything else in hospitality.”

The most frustrating aspect is that many guests have now given up. They expect hotel coffee to be bad. They slip out to the nearest decent café rather than risk the in-house offering. It has become a running joke, like airplane food or hospital meals – a category of consumption where expectations are so low they’re practically subterranean.

White sees this as a missed opportunity: “Hotels that get coffee right create a genuine point of difference. Guests remember and appreciate it because it’s still so rare.”

Perhaps the most telling indictment comes when you realize that hotel staff themselves often avoid their own coffee. Watch carefully in the morning and you might spot the concierge with a takeaway cup from the independent café down the street. Even they know better.

As we approach 2025, with coffee culture more sophisticated than ever, the luxury hotel industry remains stubbornly behind the curve. In establishments where no detail is too small to perfect – where rooms are scented with signature fragrances and turndown service includes artisanal chocolates – the humble coffee cup remains a blind spot.

The next time a waiter in a five-star establishment asks if you’d like coffee, perhaps the appropriate response is: “I’d love one. Could you recommend somewhere nearby?”