If you have ever felt tempted to pilfer more than the toiletries and stationery from your hotel room, you will be pleased to know that you are not alone!

A recent survey carried out by TripAdvisor on 19,000 guests and 10,000 hoteliers revealed that up to 70 per cent of us take more than the tea bags when checking out of our hotel rooms, with towels, clothes hangers, dressing gowns and light bulbs being the most popular “souvenirs”.

Those tiny tubes of shampoo and pocket-sized soaps may well be there for the taking, but should we really be helping ourselves to the batteries from remote controls, ashtrays, and items from the mini bar? Well, according to hoteliers, this happens every day, and if the survey is anything to go by, those who were interviewed were not exactly honest about the extent of their ‘nicking’.

Just five percent of travellers confessed to taking towels from a hotel room, yet a whopping 25% of hoteliers report towels going missing following a guest’s stay.  There were similar discrepancies over clothes hangers, with just 2 per cent of travellers admitting to taking them, while 10 per cent of hoteliers said they had disappeared.

With figures like these, it is no surprise that many hotels now charge us a ‘deposit’ for everything, but isn’t it a bit sad… I mean, does anyone ever use these mini toiletries, or is it just a case of ‘it’s there, I’ve paid to stay here, I’m taking it’?

Well, we all love a freebie, and the hotels do entice us with their impressive ranges of “complimentary amenities”, but perhaps they should start indicating what is ‘complimentary’ and what is not, or they could end up losing much more than the tea bags!