If having a $25 hamburger delivered to your hotel room isn’t your idea of a deal, you’re not alone. Hotels know their room service prices aren’t very appetizing, so they’re looking to reinvent the way in-room dining handled.

Cost is the main deterrent of room service for both guests and hoteliers. While hotel room service menus have a reputation for being wildly overpriced, running in-house dining is expensive for the hotel.

“[Hotels are] just not seeing the return on this anymore,” Alex Susskind, associate professor of food-and-beverage management at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration is quoted as saying in the industry trade journal Restaurant Hospitality. “It’s expensive to maintain and the quality is hard to keep up. They are backing off, but not just deserting guests.”

Instead, some hotels are taking advantage of many travelers’ desire to eat the local fare, so they’re teaming up with nearby restaurants for what Restaurant Hospitality called “restaurant delivery as amenity” — a partnership with local restaurants to deliver in-room dining. The guest gets to sample local food without going out, while a local restaurant gets business and saves the hotel the expensive of a full-time kitchen.

In-room dining is price the same as the restaurant menu with a small service fee of a dollar or two, typically to cover the cost of the packaging. It’s a nice option for guests who want it all when they travel — reasonable prices, relaxation, and also a taste of the local scene.

But it’s not just cost that has killed room service. The luxury of eating delicious food within eyeshot of your bed is now just a way of life. An explosion of delivery services around the country now means that with just a smartphone, we can have nearly any food we want, at any time, brought into our comfort zone. When viewed through that lens, traditional room service is just as outdated as hotels or airplanes offering movie rentals on TV — does anyone actually travel nowadays without a screen of some sort?

(h/t Food & Wine)


Also see: 9 Anthony Bourdain quotes on food and eating. 

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Meghan is a full-time writer exploring the fun facts behind food. She lives a healthy lifestyle but lives for breakfast, dessert and anything with marinara. She’s thrown away just as many meals as she’s proud of.