People often make strange requests from hotels. Heck, we have a whole article full of them. The one request my wife Sharon and I have most often isn’t that unusual, but we’ve been known to pick one hotel over another just because of access to this single amenity.
That’s right, a refrigerator.
When we travel to Texas, we prefer to have a full-size fridge/freezer combo to bring home all that wonderful barbecue. This trip was different. I was headed to New Jersey for one night for my grade school reunion, and Sharon had two requests: bring home pizza and bring home pierogi.
The day before my stay, I sent a message to the hotel via the Marriott app. If you can’t chat with the hotel, you might be able to send them a text message or email. In my message, I asked if the room had a fridge because I needed to keep some food cold for the plane ride home.
The hotel rep replied that all the rooms have in-room refrigerators. She also added that if I was bringing food back to the room and needed to keep it cold right away, I should make sure to press the turbo chill button as soon as I got to the room.
Turbo Chill???
Color me intrigued. I’d never heard of that feature before. I found it so interesting that I even called Sharon to tell her. You know it had to be important if I called instead of texting.
After stopping for the pizza and checking to make sure I had the right kind of pierogi, I headed to the hotel.
Since my room wasn’t ready, I left the food with the front desk to put into their fridge. When I returned later that evening, I brought everything to the room. The first thing I did was check the refrigerator to find the special button. There it was, in all its Turbo Chill chilliness. Well, almost.
Now, Turbo Chill sounds “cooler” than Quick Chill, but the theory is the same. If you’ve ever felt a hotel fridge when you opened it, you’d swear the thing is never going to keep anything cold.
I pressed the button, loaded the fridge with the food (and my complimentary water bottle), and hoped for the best.
I checked before heading to bed, and yes, the fridge was really cool inside. I was confident my food would make it home, but I still pressed the button again for another two-hour turbo chill just to make sure.
The following day, I packed the food using our standard “flying home with food” procedure. The hotel was so close to Newark Airport that the ice hadn’t melted when I got to the TSA checkpoint, so I didn’t even need to dump it out as a liquid before heading to the gate.
I’m glad to say, the pizza (and pierogi) made it home safely. We’re saving the pierogi until our next trip, but the pizza didn’t last more than a few days.
I’m not sure if this is a standard feature on hotel refrigerators as I’d never looked. Have you ever seen this in your room fridge?
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