Hotel brand to stop using miniature toiletries in UAE

A major hotel brand has announced that all of its brands in the UAE and other countries will stop using miniature toiletries in the next two years in order to reduce plastic waste.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) on Tuesday (July 30) confirmed to Khaleej Times that this new rule will be applicable across all of its brands - InterContinental Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and voco - and would use bulk-size bathroom amenities across its 843,000 guest rooms.

The group operates 213,794 keys across 1,078 hotels across Europe, Middle East and Africa while 379 hotels are in the pipeline with 75,033 rooms. IHG currently has an average of 200 million bathroom miniatures in use across its entire hotel estate every year.

On March 31, IHG had 22 hotels in the UAE with 6,571 rooms while 15 hotels with 4,974 rooms are on its plan.

Recently, the Hilton group also banned the use of plastic straws from all of its UAE hotels. Plastic bottles used in meetings and event spaces have also been removed. Nearly 3.5 million straws and over 2 million water bottles made of plastic will be removed each year from Hilton's 25 hotels in the UAE.

In March 2019, Khaleej Times also tied up with the UAE-based No More Bottles and launched war on plastic and encouraged its readers and associates to ditch plastic menace as much as possible.

In 2018, IHG announced that it would not use plastic straws by 2019-end.

"It's more important than ever that companies challenge themselves to operate responsibly - we know it's what our guests, owners, colleagues, investors and suppliers rightly expect. Switching to larger-size amenities is a big step in the right direction and will allow us to significantly reduce our waste footprint and environmental impact as we make the change. We've already made great strides in this area, with almost a third of our estate already adopting the change," said Keith Barr, CEO of IHG.

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