In Praise of Hotel Slippers
They make delightful travel souvenirs.
We’re well into the time of year when, while hanging around my apartment, I always want something cozy and warm on my feet. I need something to insulate them from the frigid drafts that seem to slip through not just the windows but sometimes through the walls themselves.
It’s slippers season.
Thankfully, I have no shortage of options. A trip to my closet presents an array of choices. It always takes me longer than it perhaps should to make a selection: I get briefly lost down memory lane.
They’re all from the same type of source, an admittedly slightly unconventional one.
I’m going to let you in on a little-known fact: You’re free to take the slippers home from your hotel room. Welcome to, in fact—even encouraged. And you won’t be charged.
If you’ve used them, or if housekeeping thinks you may have, they can’t be reused for the next guest; they’ll just be tossed out. You’re actually doing an environmental good deed by taking them home and reusing them yourself.
(Source: I spent many years as an editor at a travel magazine. The piece in which I asked hoteliers about this is gone from the internet and I no longer have my notes; you’ll just have to trust me.)
Branded slippers—good hotels will often have their slippers custom-embroidered with the hotel’s logo—make a great souvenir of a delightful stay, particularly in a time when fewer properties are offering personal-sized toiletries (my former favorite thing to permissibly swipe) in favor of wall-mounted bottles. For me, the slippers have largely replaced miniature bottles of shampoo in being the physical connectors to fond memories of a great hotel.
It’s fun to have a collection, not least because some go beyond the standard white-terry mules. A hotel in Oslo provided navy blue slippers monogrammed in bubble-gum pink. Its sister property offered flip-flops decorated with a seal-and-ball motif, an echo of the vintage mural adorning its famed swimming pool. Instagram shows me that a hotel I’ve booked for an upcoming trip has black peep-toe slides with art deco-inspired embroidery; I’m already planning on stashing those in my suitcase. I’ve heard of an ultraluxury hotel in London with slippers that can double as satin evening flats; you can bet those are on my personal wish list.
Which trip do I want to feel like today? you can ask yourself. Do I want to warm up by recalling poolside sun-and-fun, or evoke the coziness of wine by the fireplace?
Not all slippers are necessarily souvenir-worthy, however. This is where a bit of hotel-snobbishness comes in.
Basic hotel slippers—the plain white ones that sometimes don’t even distinguish between left and right feet—are fine; they’ll do their job of keeping your feet off cold hardwood floors and insulated from drafts.
Better ones exist, however. If possible, you want the slippers from the good hotels, the posh ones where the bath towels and robes are thrice as fluffy as what you have at home. Those are the places that will have the slippers worth keeping: softer, thicker, more padding in the footbed, more interesting designs.
But room cost doesn’t necessarily directly correlate with slipper quality. My current favorites (they’re Frette) are from a boutique hotel in Cartagena that charged a fraction of the price of a place I’ve stayed in Beverly Hills. Though I kept the slippers from the California hotel, too.
The bad news: Most of these slippers will quickly fall apart if you try to wash them. They’re intended to be disposable; their lifespan is inherently fleeting. It’s a double-edged sword: This is why they’re free to take in the first place.
But if you travel with any frequency, you’re likely to accumulate a sufficient supply to keep you going through the colder months. When you toss out one pair that’s gotten irredeemably dirty, you’re sure to have several others waiting to serve in its place.
In this way, they again bear a functional similarity to those tiny bottles of toiletries: Once put into service, they’re soon used up and discarded, to then be replaced with another slightly used set in a different fabric or fragrance.
But in the meantime, they serve as a way of extending the memories of a great vacation and of bringing a bit of hotel luxury home with you. They help provide a momentary sense of escape, as well as inspiration to escape again as soon as you’re able.