Your minibar may be keeping score

WANTED: Guest, any age over 18, for two consecutive nights at a city-centre hotel, room already paid for. Duties: open the fridge, remove and consume between six and eight items per evening, keep the receipts, do not touch the water. Must be willing to check in under my loyalty number; references not required, appetite is.

Hotel minibars have been in decline for years; many chains have removed them or replaced them with lobby shops because restocking costs and disputes over charges made them unprofitable. Sensor-equipped minibars that automatically bill guests when an item is moved have existed for decades. Meanwhile, hotel and airline loyalty programmes increasingly use gamified mechanics such as tiers, streaks and challenges, and some travellers book stays purely to retain status. Leaderboards and rankings have spread from fitness and language apps into workplaces and consumer services. Hotels are also under pressure to grow ancillary revenue beyond the room rate.

The advertisement would appear in the classified section of a regional free newspaper, between a lawnmower and a request for a lost cat, and it would be placed by a 44-year-old logistics coordinator named Martin Keable. Under a scheme being piloted by one of the larger mid-market hotel groups, minibar consumption would count towards loyalty status, and each property would display a live leaderboard of its highest-consuming guests in the lift and on the in-room television. Mr Keable would be ranked fourth at the property he stays at every other Tuesday. He would like to be third.

The leaderboard would award one point per item removed from the fridge, with multipliers for full-price spirits, a bonus for emptying a shelf, and a streak for consumption on consecutive nights. Rankings would reset each quarter. The top-ranked guest on each floor would receive late checkout and a laminated card; the bottom ten per cent would receive a message described in the terms as a “wellness nudge”, reminding them that the pistachios are available. Points would not be awarded for the still water, which the group would classify as a fixture rather than a product, like the kettle.

Guests would respond the way guests respond to any points system, which is by booking rooms they do not need. Travel forums would fill with accounts of “minibar runs”, in which a member checks into the cheapest available room, empties the fridge into a holdall, and checks out before breakfast. A secondary market would follow. “I'm not a big drinker, and I'm not a big eater, but I have a very good relationship with the lift,” Dawn Pritchard, 31, would say, having answered Mr Keable's advertisement. She would describe her rate as eleven pounds an item, cashews extra.

Housekeeping staff would notice the change first. A room attendant named Joseph Barlow would report restocking the same fridge three times in a night, for a guest who did not appear to consume anything. “He takes the bottles out and puts them on the windowsill in a row,” he would say. “Then he goes to bed. In the morning I put them back and the system charges him again, so he goes up a place.” Mr Barlow would be asked whether he had reported this. He would say that the leaderboard had his name on it too, under a heading marked Restock Velocity.

The group's revenue team would spend most of the first quarter on fairness. Suites would be found to have larger fridges, giving their occupants a structural advantage, and the leaderboard would be re-weighted by room category, then by region, then by what the internal documentation would call “ambient consumption context”. An appeals process would allow guests to contest items removed by children, and one guest would successfully argue that a triangular chocolate bar had fallen out of the door on its own. The ruling would take six weeks and would be published, without names, as guidance.

Asked whether ranking guests by what they take from a small fridge was consistent with the group's wellbeing commitments, its head of guest engagement, Helen Ashworth, would say that the leaderboard was opt-out, that opting out was available under settings, and that settings could be found on the television. She would add that the scheme had improved minibar revenue for the first time in two decades, which the industry had largely given up on. “Nobody told the minibar it was obsolete,” she would say. “We just gave it a reason to compete.”

Mr Keable would reach third on a Wednesday in March, according to the in-room television, which would display his initials, his floor, and a small animation of a bottle. Ms Pritchard would have consumed, on his behalf, fourteen items across two nights, and would have left the receipts in an envelope on the pillow, as agreed. He would not stay in the room. He would look at the leaderboard in the lift, photograph it, and go home to his wife, who would ask whether it had been worth it. He would say that the water still didn't count.