Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!
Breakfast - August 2025
It is time for another in my occasional series of blog posts that reflect on travel from the perspective of someone with decidedly poor eyesight, and my chosen topic this month is breakfast.
Inevitably I will deviate to share a few non vision impairment related observations and it is with one of these that I will begin.
I had a couple of nights in a small hotel in Plymouth last month and it was the breakfast arrangements that reminded me I’d been intending to do a blog on the topic. It was explained to me on checking in that each day I needed to fill in my breakfast choices for the following morning on a printed A5 sheet of paper and place this in a tray at reception before midnight.
In theory this may help to reduce food waste, but few if any of the items from which one had to preselect were characterised by having a fleeting shelf-life. This rigmarole also rather undermines the joy of spontaneity that being able to sit at a breakfast table and think “what do I feel like having this morning” provides.
Plus, the cost, both financial and environmental, of printing and distributing around 20 A5 sheets of paper each and every day surely outweigh the benefits?
More often than not hotel breakfasts feature a buffet from which guests are invited to graze. This presents plenty of fun-filled adventures for those of us with poor eyesight. One of which is unrelated to the buffet itself but can prove especially problematic if it is an establishment with a large room-count and thus a large breakfast dining area.
The issue to which I refer is being able to find the table at which you have been seated by the member of staff that’s ticked off your name and room number as you arrive. If it’s really close to the buffet, or a notable feature this may be straightforward, but if it’s a table amidst a sea of other tables I have been known to sit down and think, “hang on, why is there a half-eaten croissant staring at me”, the answer of course being that I have plonked myself down at someone else’s table who happens to have either left, or is still finding more goodies to consume.
The buffet itself presents a variety of challenges. There are plenty of breakfast food items that my vision is definitely good enough to easily identify, but equally there will always be items that don’t shout “I’m bacon” or “I’m a fried egg” at you, and all too often there will be a little descriptor sign telling you what the item is in a font size that’s several point sizes smaller than would be ideal.
Occasionally you just have to decide that whatever the item is looks ok and take a chance, hoping that having it on the same plate as the other items you’ve chosen isn’t some dreadful culinary faux pas that will play havoc with your tastebuds. My biggest concern is that I may inadvertently have allowed grapefruit to infiltrate a bowl of fruit salad as it baffles me as to why anyone would willingly consume it!
That mention of a plate brings to mind another bugbear, namely that so many hotels expect you to put hot food straight onto a cold plate. Now, I entirely see why you don’t want to have piles of scalding hot crockery on the buffet counter, but providing plates that are at least warm is surely achievable?
Teaspoons are not just for stirring your tea and coffee (more of which shortly), they are a vital tool if a pot of yogurt features among your breakfast items, and it is not at all unusual for me to fail to locate said item of cutlery anywhere close to the array of yogurts, meaning either there is some secret stache that I’m just not seeing, or the hotel expects you to use a dessert spoon which is not at all well suited to the task in hand. Repurposing the teaspoon with which I’ve stirred my tea is another viable workaround!
A rare delight is when a member of waiting staff asks if you would like tea or coffee, whereas a moment of trepidation looms when you are told that a machine will dispense the hot drink of your choice.
The visual challenges posed by such machines are many and varied. In no particular order there is finding the machine and the mugs, figuring out where you are supposed to place the mug, and as someone who tends to prefer tea to coffee at breakfast-time I’ve discovered that very often hot water does not flow from the same nozzle as do the other options. Getting this wrong leads to having to swiftly relocate the mug while trying not to get a very hot liquid all over your hand.
Then there is figuring out how to use the machine itself, with the text describing what you’ll get if you press a particular button being small and (more the case for hot water than other options) whether you just press the button and the machine knows when to stop, or whether you have to keep it pressed until you have the correct volume.
I take milk in my tea, and this provides one last beverage challenge if the hotel doesn’t have neat little pre-filled milk jugs on each table, as the alternative tends to be having to use the milk that will be vaguely in the same area as the cereals, often in jugs or bottles from which it is tricky with poor eyesight to pour just a splash of milk.
It is fortunate that I am an early riser as this enables me to venture into the breakfast room before it becomes too crowded, meaning I can do a thorough recce of what’s available without getting in anyone’s way prior to making my initial choices, and that if I do something vaguely comical thanks to my eyesight there won’t be too huge an audience!
Despite the many boobytraps that potentially await, breakfast remains a vital part of any trip! .