I collect them as well. I like to leave them in the bathroom for guests when they arrive. I prepare a little basket of amenities in case they forget them.

Hotels actually expect guests to take their amenities, etc. It is advertising.. very similar to all the pens and pencils and balloons that are set out at conferences etc. Don't feel guilty about taking them! I use some of them in my guest bathrooms, take to the pool, kids use them on school trips and have given them out shelters myself..I have seen them at garage sales if you can believe that!!And people buy them!!

I use part them in the hotel, then I take them home and finish them off. (I agree with goahead's gym bag idea.) The little bottles of mouthwash are great to keep at my desk at work.

Favorites are:
* little plastic sleeves with 5 cotton balls in a row
* oatmeal soap from Radisson -- they last so long it would be really wasteful not to take them home

I always take them, as many as I can get. I use them in my travel bottles. I think I probably have 5 different types of shampoo in my small travel bottle but it is fun - and doesn't smell bad. The soaps I am less likely to use but will take them if I like the smell. I like the idea of the shelters using them - duh! I'll remember that for the future.

I, too, have been taking the amenities to our local shelter for years now.

I have "poor" live at home twenty something boys and give them the soaps and shampoos that I DO take (and I too love those sewing kits and I like the shoe shine cloths), but I LOVE the shelter idea!! I am ashamed I never thought of it.

Everyone in my office collects the shampoos and soaps when travelling for business or vacation and we give them to the local shelter. With all the travelling we do, we keep the shelter pretty well stocked.

As one who works in a hotel, I can attest that it's not a big deal when a guest walks out with the soap or shampoo. We do sort of expect that.

What we do not appreciate is when a guest walks out with the ashtrays, pillows, blankets, sheets, towels, remote controls, coffeemakers, clocks, irons, ironing boards, nightlights, hair dryers, lampshades, drapes, or shower curtains. And its especially bedeviling to discover that a guest has stolen all the lightbulbs from a room, or as has once happened, stolen the batteries from the remote control, but nothing else.

Austin...I could have written that same note! We've recently started using some very nice, but extremely expensive flourescent bulbs, and they are disappearing from the rooms right and left.

Have also just completed a 10 mil dollar renovation. There are throws folded across the foot of each bed, in a pattern that coordinates with everything in the room. In the first month following the completion of the renovation, 12 of them were taken. The concern now is that there isn't enough "attic stock" to replace them if they keep exiting the property at this pace, and fabrics are discontinued so often they've had to go back and order far more than anticipated, and of course at a highter price, because it is no longer the bulk order. What gives anyway? I can't imagine stuffing a major item like that into my suitcase. And light bulbs...do they even get home in one piece? Batteries too, or the whole remote. It's disheartening.

Soaps, shampoo, no problem...they expect those to go and they aren't reused anyway, though I don't agree with having full sized soaps, usually luxe, restocked daily, but certainly no one expects integral parts of a room to disappear. It is enough of a problem now that they are looking into instituting a policy to deal with it, rather than letting it go.

People are weird... they'll steal anything, and it's like some sort of evil extraterrestrial intelligence takes over the moment they walk through the hotel doors. What else would possess you to steal the drapes, anyway? Once we even had a guest steal the knobs off the bathroom faucet.

We've attempted to deal with rampant theft by instructing the housekeepers to make a detailed list of missing items from every room, so we can charge the cost of replacement to the guest's credit card. Unfortunately, because the housekeepers speak English about as well as my cats do, they have yet to make any sort of list whatsoever and we don't discover that something's missing until the next guest checks in -- apparently because the stress of communicating via hand gestures that the comforter is missing would be too much to bear, the housekeepers never bother to tell us when something's gone. They just make the bed -- sand comforter -- like nothing's at all amiss.

Between the guests and the housekeepers, it's almost like there's a sinister plot afoot to drive me insane, or to seek a job with the government. I did work for the county government here once, and it was very nice to be allowed to be as surly as I pleased. I kind of miss it.

Austin - your hotel should consider an illustrated, multi-lingual check off sheet for housekeeping to use both to double check the existance of such items when the rooms is made ready for renting (just use the top one in the pad, no need to mark the sheet up, and to mark it (missing, damaged, stained, burnt .. etc) when things are wrong.

btw, I've been in rooms where the batteries in the remote were shot, and just threw them away, leaving the remote with it's cover open/off so that it would be operable for the next guest. I don't consider it a burden to walk to the TV to operate it.

While I have your attention, something that bugs me so much is when I check into a room at night, flick on the switch, and nothing happens, because the switch controls an outlet, and the lamp plugged into that outlet is turned off.

That is a very good idea, actually. It wasn't quite so bad when the housekeepers spoke the same language as the owners, but now that that's not the case, it's torture. It would be quite helpful to have a checklist like that, and I know someone who I can probably get to write one up. Thanks for that suggestion! Currently we only have a list on the wall of common Spanish terms, but it never does any good. You can stand there all day saying the Spanish word for "shower curtain", and the houskeepers will just stand there and look at you as though they're examining a particularly rare species of fish.

Meanwhile, you wouldn't have to worry about that pet peeve of yours. I personally would think it dangerous to have such a complicated wiring system. At my hotel, if you flip a switch the wall fixture comes on, unless the lightbulb has burned out or been stolen. When you switch on a lamp, it responds barring the above reasons.

And as a side note, we did actually find out what happened to the batteries that disappeared from one particular remote control. The guest used them in a personal appliance, and that's all I care to say about it.