Time to Return the Towels

D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel Wants Its Stuff and Your Stories

If a sterling silver teaspoon that once belonged on a hotel breakfast tray should end up inside a guest's suitcase, is it a memento legitimately acquired or outright pilfered? Does conscience draw the line at a five-gallon punch bowl? How about a monogrammed bathrobe?

When it comes to souvenirs, hotels have a powerful ability to unleash the inner kleptomaniac.

In the course of eight decades, the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue NW has lost mountains of trinkets, most stamped with its signature sailing vessel. Now the iconic hotel wants them back. Starting Wednesday, it is offering an amnesty to coincide with the publication of a book documenting the hotel's place in the Washington firmament. Behind every coffee pot and demitasse, every patrician oyster bowl and every humble bathmat, lies a tale of its vanishing that the 657-room hotel hopes to collect.

Which is not to suggest that the hotel considers its genteel visitors to be common larcenists.

"In the past, when you traveled somewhere, there was more memory associated with an event," said Keith McClinsey, author of "Washington, D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel" and the hotel's sales manager. "I don't necessarily think people thought they were stealing anything. They looked at it as a gift item."

Guests once preferred "gifts" of engraved ashtrays or china plates. Today, hotel staff say, they most often spirit away bathrobes and towels.

Silver utensils engraved with the Mayflower ship remain a favorite. One year in the 1940s, 4,000 teaspoons vanished despite the best efforts of the house silversmith, who diligently counted the silverware after parties.

A few still disappear, said Julian Mejia, the hotel's silversmith for the past 26 years, as he stood in the silver room between shelves crammed with chafing dishes, tea trays and coffee urns deep below the hotel's gold-trimmed Promenade and Grand Ballroom.

Sticky fingers are a common problem in the hotel industry. The American Hotel Lodging Association said in 2000 that guest theft costs the industry approximately $100 million a year, although the figure could include employee theft. So prevalent is the tendency that many hotels factor it into their annual operating budgets. The Mayflower foots a $300,000 replacement bill each year, including breakages.

In recent years, some chain hotels have preempted temptation by turning into design showcases and offering for sale everything from lamps to 300-thread-count sheets. Hoteliers elsewhere, however, say objects are infused with the place's history; walk away with one, and you take a piece of the hotel's soul.

Thus was born the hotel amnesty.

Holiday Inn held its first nationwide Towel Amnesty Day in August 2003, bribing guests who had ever swiped a towel with one of 60,000 "limited-edition, green-striped" replacements. Absolution came with a caveat: Guests had to relate their towel stories, which were compiled into a coffee-table book.