Soap dispensers vs individual bottles in Airbnb bathrooms: the refill model that saves me £4 a turnover

Individual bottles were costing me more than I thought

For the first three years of hosting I put out individual bottles in every bathroom. Shower gel, shampoo, conditioner. Three separate bottles per bathroom, per guest. I used the Baylis & Harding citrus range because it was cheap enough in bulk from Costco and guests seemed to like the smell.

The maths, as I eventually worked out: roughly £1.80 per turnover per bathroom just in toiletries. Across five properties, some with two bathrooms, at two turnovers a week — it added up to somewhere around £180 a month. Not a huge number in isolation. But the other thing I noticed was waste. Guests would crack open a new bottle, use a quarter of it, and leave. I'd throw away the rest because I couldn't put a half-used bottle back out for the next guest.

That half-empty bottle problem is what made me look at dispensers.

Wall-mounted vs shelf pump

There are two approaches and I've tried both. Wall-mounted dispensers — the kind you see in budget hotels, screwed to the tiles above the shower rail — and shelf-based pump bottles that just sit on the side of the bath or the bathroom shelf.

Wall-mounted: I put them in the Edinburgh Broughton Street flat about eighteen months ago. The Simplehuman triple-bottle unit, around £65. It looks clean, it's easy to refill with a 1-litre bulk bottle, and guests don't complain about it. What guests do occasionally do is press the pump about twelve times to get what they need and leave a puddle on the floor. It's not universal — most guests are fine — but it happens more than I expected. Wall dispensers rely on the pump mechanism working every time, and they can get blocked if you use thick gels.

The other thing: wall-mounting in a rental flat you don't own is sometimes not an option. Two of my properties are managed leaseholds with restrictive leases about drilling. So wall-mounted anything is off the table unless I want a conversation with the freeholder.

Shelf pumps are simpler. I use the Muji acrylic pump bottles — they're clear, they look reasonably good, and they refill in about thirty seconds with a proper 1-litre bottle and a funnel. Three bottles per bathroom: shower gel, shampoo, conditioner. Cost to buy: about £9 for the set. Cost to run: whatever you fill them with.

What I fill them with

This is where the actual saving is. I switched to the Method brand 1-litre refills — around £6 for 1 litre of shower gel from Ocado or Amazon — and the Aldi Lacura 500ml shampoo and conditioner at about £1.89 each. The Aldi stuff is fine. No guest has ever mentioned the shampoo brand in a review, positive or negative, and I've been using it for a year now across three properties.

The per-turnover cost with this setup: I refill the bottles every three to four turnovers rather than every time. Each pump bottle holds about 300ml. A fill costs roughly 40–50p depending on which product. So across three bottles per bathroom I'm spending about £1.20–1.50 per bathroom, per refill, which amortised over four turnovers is under 40p per turnover.

Compare that to £1.80 per turnover in individual bottles. The saving per bathroom is roughly £1.40 per turnover. My five properties turn over about 180 times per year combined, most of them with one bathroom, two with two bathrooms. That's a saving in the region of £300 a year. Which isn't going to retire me but is a reasonably cheerful number for ten minutes of system setup.

The hygiene question

I get asked about this. Isn't it less hygienic than individual sealed bottles?

Honestly: not meaningfully, no. The product inside is still the product — shower gel, shampoo, conditioner — and those are all pH-controlled enough that nothing bad grows in them. The pump mechanism doesn't get contaminated in any meaningful way from normal use. I clean the exterior of the bottles during each turnover, which takes about twenty seconds with a damp cloth. The bottles go through a hot wash with the bathroom cleaning supplies roughly every two months.

Individual mini-bottles have their own issue: the cap. Those little flip-top caps get gunky. Guests don't wash their hands before opening shampoo. The opening of a mini-bottle isn't meaningfully more hygienic than a pump dispenser. I'm not losing sleep over this one.

The one thing I'd say: keep the pump bottles full. A pump bottle that's almost empty with some old gel drying around the nozzle looks bad. It looks like you haven't paid attention. I check levels during every turnover and top up anything below a third.

What I still put out individually

Two things: face wash and hand soap. Face wash because it's genuinely more personal — some guests have sensitive skin or specific needs — so I leave one individual tube per booking from the pound shop range (Simple or Cetaphil clones, usually). Hand soap I do individually too, because a pump soap dispenser on the sink gets used by everyone with anything on their hands, and it gets murky. I use the Method foaming hand soap in the small pump, one per bathroom per booking. At about £1.50 each from Tesco it's not cheap, but hand soap is the one point where individual bottles still make more sense to me.

Body wash and hair products: pumps, refilled in bulk, every time now. No going back.

The one thing that doesn't work about pump dispensers

Guests sometimes steal them. Not often. But twice in eighteen months I've done a post-checkout check and noticed a Muji bottle missing. At £3 a bottle it's not catastrophic, but it's mildly annoying and means I now keep a few spares in the supply cupboard.

The other minor thing: if a guest brings their own products and doesn't use yours, you might find your pump bottles haven't moved between their arrival and departure. That's fine — it just means you don't need to refill before the next turnover. I check levels regardless during the pre-arrival check.

Overall: the dispenser system is the right call for anything beyond a one-off listing. The per-turnover saving is real, the waste drops dramatically, and the bathroom looks more considered than a cluster of individual minis on the edge of the bath. That last part matters more than hosts give it credit for. Guests notice the difference between "someone thought about this bathroom" and "someone bought a multipack from Poundland and called it a day."