TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS

I read with interest your article “Taken to the Cleaners” published in the December 2017/January 2018 issue of Business Traveller. I have always wondered how hotels price laundry and had assumed that they use the same formula as drug companies: think of a price and quadruple it. From your article, I gather that I was more or less correct. The reason is simply that most people like to wear clean clothes, and if you must use the hotel laundry to acheive that aim, you will.

Personally, I avoid using hotel laundry, googling laundrettes ahead of time or sometimes staying in hotels that have washing machines. I have also availed myself of FedEx Ground in the US, sending a bag of clothes ahead of time to the hotel, since it works out cheaper than using the hotel laundry.

I am planning a leisure trip from Boston to the UK next summer, and will travel via Amsterdam for a night, thus adding an extra day of laundry. I have been looking at various options, and I am delighted to see there are several competing companies in London that will pick up and deliver laundry for a fraction of the cost that the hotel will charge.

Is it worth the extra hassle of trying to find cheaper laundry? Obviously the answer is yes, and partly on principle. I’d like to conclude with the observation that companies may well have happily paid for hotel laundry in the past, but for independent business travellers (a growing trend), this is no longer the case. I suspect that just as phones in hotel rooms have become all but obsolete (because most

people have mobiles or use VoIP to call), so will the need for hotel laundry as the new generation of laundry collection and delivery services grows.

M-B, Waltham, Massachusetts