During a recent hotel stay, my wife and I used the in-room coffeemaker quite a bit. The device itself was well-designed and made fairly good coffee, but it was limited to one cup at a time. So, I found myself having to repeat the process several times in order to produce a normal amount of coffee for two people.

This made me wonder: aside from business-oriented hotels where it’s typically one person per room, shouldn’t hotels have a slightly bigger coffeemaker? If the typical room has two guests, a one cup coffee machine seems a bit skimpy. By providing a larger model, the hotel would greatly improve the in-room coffee experience.

Of course, I’m not proposing that hotels install a full-size, 10-12 cup coffeemaker. Instead, something in the range of 3-4 cups is probably ideal. Alternatively, it might make sense to provide bigger coffee machines in suites and other large rooms, which are more likely to have two or more guests staying there at once. Either way, it’s clear that the one-size-fits-all approach is far from optimal when it comes to hotel coffeemakers, and a little bit of extra capacity would probably make customers a lot happier.