I tested Molton Brown, Aesop, and Sainsbury's own-brand in five Airbnbs

A guest once left a review that said my shampoo was "serviceable". That's the word she used. Serviceable. Four stars on amenities, five everywhere else, and a small, polite mention of the shampoo. I spent about a week being mildly offended, and then I thought: right, fine, I'll do it properly.

So for nine months last year I ran an experiment across my five properties. Molton Brown at the two Brighton flats. Aesop at the Edinburgh Old Town one-bed. Sainsbury's Taste the Difference at the Hove studio. And a decanted Waitrose No.1 setup at the Lake District cottage. Same towels, same everything else. Only the shampoo, shower gel, and conditioner changed. 264 turnovers between them, and at the end of it I had a spreadsheet I'm still refining.

Here is what I found, per property, in pence and in reviews.

The three tiers, and what they actually cost

I'm going to skip the shiny-website version and go to the per-guest cost, because that's the only figure I actually make decisions on.

Molton Brown 50ml amenity bottles. I bought these through their trade programme — you fill in a form, wait about a week for a call-back, and then they send pricing that is nowhere on the retail site. The 50ml Re-charge Black Pepper body wash was working out at around £3.40 a bottle in boxes of 100. Hand cream was a bit more. I put three bottles per stay in the Brighton flats (shampoo, conditioner, body wash). Per guest stay, that's about £10.20 just on amenities, before you count the hand wash at the sink.

Aesop Geranium Leaf travel set. This is the complicated one. Aesop does not do a traditional 50ml amenity line for small hosts. What I ended up buying was the 50ml travel-size bottles at retail — around £17 for the set, usually split between the three bathroom products. That's roughly £6 per bottle at retail. Hotel-programme Aesop exists but is gated behind an agreement I wasn't remotely big enough to sign. So I was paying retail, and I was losing bottles to guests who pocketed them. Per guest stay: around £12.50 in amenities plus, crucially, a £6 bottle walking out the door roughly every third stay.

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference shower range. I decant this into refillable 300ml wall-mounted dispensers. Rosemary & eucalyptus range, three bottles a month at about £5 each, lasts me across both the studio and one of the Brighton flats if I'm honest. Per guest stay cost of the decant approach: somewhere between 40p and 70p, depending on how heavy-handed the guest is.

Waitrose No.1 bottles, decanted. Sat in the middle. I was paying £8-ish a bottle, decanting into the same wall-mounted dispensers. About £1.20 per guest stay. I ran this for five months at the Lake District cottage mainly because a guest had left it and I wanted to know what would happen if I just bought more of it.

What the reviews actually said

This is where it got interesting. I went through every review in the 264-turnover test window and pulled out every mention of anything to do with the bathroom amenities. Positive, negative, neutral. The word counts:

• Molton Brown flats: 18 positive mentions, 2 neutral, 0 negative. Words used most often: "lovely", "luxury", "spoiled", "fragrant".
• Aesop flat (Edinburgh): 14 positive mentions, 1 neutral, 0 negative. Words: "beautiful", "boutique hotel", "designer". The Edinburgh flat has a generally higher-end guest profile, so hard to fully isolate.
• Sainsbury's decanted (Hove studio): 2 positive mentions ("nice soap"), 3 neutral, 0 negative. Nobody complained.
• Waitrose decanted (Lake District): 4 positive mentions, 1 neutral ("the shampoo was fine"), 0 negative.

Only the Brighton Molton Brown flat had guests mentioning the amenities unprompted in positive terms at a rate I'd call meaningful — roughly one in four reviews. Everywhere else, the amenities were essentially invisible unless I went looking for them.

The review star scores? Almost identical across all five properties once I controlled for the property itself. Molton Brown didn't push the review score up. Aesop didn't either. The amenity upgrade was showing up in review text, not in stars.

The 'serviceable' guest, revisited

I went back to check what that guest had been given. It was a Hotel Collection chemist-shop shampoo I'd bought in a panic run because my cleaner had used up the previous batch and I had two back-to-back turnovers. The answer to "serviceable" was, almost certainly, "anything with a real brand on the bottle". I'd been over-reading the problem.

That was the first shift in how I thought about this: the bad amenity is a much bigger downside risk than the good amenity is upside. A guest given supermarket own-brand in a nice refillable dispenser does not write a review about it. A guest given a petrol-station own-label in a plastic pillow pack mentions it for weeks. The job is to avoid the bad experience, not to chase the reviewer's brand recognition.

Which tier for which property

My portfolio by the end of the experiment:

• Brighton One (avg £178/night): Molton Brown 50ml bottles, three per stay. The premium positioning of the listing justifies it. Cost per night absorbed: £3.60 roughly.
• Brighton Two (avg £162/night): Dropped Molton Brown. Moved to decanted Neom Organics (around £24 per 500ml wholesale). Dispensed. Cost per guest around £1.40. Reviews did not change after the switch.
• Edinburgh (avg £205/night): Kept Aesop retail bottles. The guest profile is distinctly boutique-hotel-expecting, and the cost is offset by a higher nightly rate. I've now got the Aesop bottle refilled at each turnover with Aesop from a bigger bottle, which sounds dodgy but I'm upfront about it in the welcome note. Nobody has ever queried it.
• Lake District (avg £240/night): Decanted Neom Organics, same as Brighton Two. The rural guests don't seem to care about brand in the bathroom. They care about log fires and a functioning kettle.
• Hove studio (avg £98/night): Sainsbury's Taste the Difference, decanted. One guest said "nice soap", literally ever. Cost is invisible on the P&L.

What I stopped bothering with

Hand cream. I was spending about £1.80 per guest on a little Molton Brown hand cream in the Brighton flats. Nobody ever mentioned the hand cream. Not once in 264 stays. I removed it, watched for three months, and no reviews changed. That's a £450/year saving I hadn't noticed I was making.

Bath bombs. Adorable on Pinterest, pointless in practice. The one flat where I trialled them picked up a few complaints about stained towels from the pigment. Gone.

Shampoo-bar trials. I had a phase of trying to be ethical about it. Guests either ignored the bar completely or reported "your shower gel has gone solid" to my co-host. The intention was lovely, the uptake was zero. Back to dispensers.

A note on the 'welcome bottle'

Related topic, same decision framework. The welcome bottle is the other place hosts over-spend. I was doing a mid-range £9-£11 Rioja for about a year, at three of the five properties. One day I swapped one flat to a £6 Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Cotes du Rhone (which is genuinely decent) and watched for mentions. Over four months, exactly zero guests noticed the change. The welcome bottle mattered, but the price of it — at that range — didn't.

Below £6, it starts to look stingy. Above about £12, you are paying for your own satisfaction, not the guest's. Pick a reliable £7-£9 bottle, put it on a clean glass tray with two wine glasses, and move on.

The spreadsheet line that finally made sense

I keep a single row in my monthly ops spreadsheet for "bathroom amenity per guest". Here's the target I've landed on:

• Sub-£100 nightly rate: under £1 per guest
• £100-£175 nightly: £1-£2 per guest
• £175-£250 nightly: £2-£4 per guest
• £250+ nightly: £4-£6 per guest, named-brand, because the guest expectation is set by the price

These are not rules. They are my rules. But if you want a simple way of deciding whether to carry on buying Molton Brown or switch to Neom at half the price, plot your nightly rate against what you're spending per guest on amenities, and see if you are inside or outside those bands. The three flats where I was outside the band are the three where I changed.

The per-unit stocktake that stopped me running out

One small operational point. Before I started tracking this properly, I'd run out of Molton Brown bottles in Brighton One about once every two months, then panic-buy from a chemist. That's where the £4 average cost per bottle becomes £7, because I'd be buying singles at retail.

Now the stocktake is weekly. My cleaner photographs the amenity shelf at the end of each turnover, and Hoststock flags when we're below reorder level (three bottles of each line, per flat). I buy the next box of 100 before I need it, at the trade price I signed up for, and I've not panic-bought a bottle since last August. Small change, measurable saving: about £180/year on amenity line alone across five properties.

Moral of the story: the guest doesn't notice which shampoo you use. They notice whether it runs out, whether it smells off, and whether the dispenser works. The luxury brand is a backdrop prop, not the show.

If you only take one thing from this

Spend your amenity budget on consistency, not on a label. A refillable wall dispenser with a decent £5/bottle supermarket range, refilled reliably at every turnover, beats a £4 Molton Brown bottle left half-empty for the next four guests. Every time.