How do hotels keep sheets and towels white?

The beckoning of glistening white sateen striped bed sheets, or the soft & comfy whiter than white towel, makes one wonder! How do hotels keep their sheets and towels white? Read on to find out how hotels maintain top standards, from the purchasing of commercial hotel-grade bed & bath linens, to efficiently and properly laundering them!

Much like a restaurant uses commercial/industrial grade stoves and cookware, a hotel’s linens are obtained from specialist hotel-grade brands like Gentelle, where the linen is designed around comfort, while also designed to withstand industrial laundry/washing methods, among other things.

When hotels promise comfort and an exceptional stay-experience to guests, depending on the type of hotel, it’s a must that every square inch of a sheet, and the beautiful soft touch of a towel lends a story of comfort, quality, cleanliness, and care to the guest. This is how guests leave great reviews, and this is how they keep coming back, or the reviews doing the job of convincing new guests-to-be.

So what does quality have to do with keeping hotel linens white?

Many new boutique hotels may sometimes make the mistake of purchasing off-the-shelf consumer-grade bedding and towels, however, this can sometimes be a costly mistake. Because while the bedding and towels, and other bath linens may seem glittery, a specialist hotel brand alongside being quality-comfort-centric, also promises durability of it’s linens when washing.

So what does that mean?

Well, when it comes to industrial washing of these bed and bath linens, while certain hotels may take a less-stringent approach to laundry, some hotels can take a much tougher approach that involve heavy chemicals, perhaps beyond anything found in an average home.

Hotels are generally serious about the trust put in them by guests, so as Dan Tannehill will tell you, even though a bed may not have been slept in, that bedding is still going to the laundry pile after even a night’s stay of a guest. Although perhaps very cheap hotels may not do as such.

“...Mr & Mrs Smith checked out of room 224 this morning. When I go in, I notice that only one bed appears to have been slept in. The other is pristine. Also, it would seem that the Smiths were into conserving water as only one face cloth and 2 towels were used. Guess what? Both beds get stripped of sheets and pillow cases and even the fresh towels get sent down to laundry.”

This is the seriousness of a commercial hotel brand. And for this type of heavy-handed usage, the lines procured by big brand hotels, had better be something special!

So what is purchased? And what chemicals do they use in the laundry?

If you walk into an upmarket retail outlet and grab any towel off the shelf, and take a fine look at the thread loops of the towel, the quality of the stitch of the towel’s border, it’s weight (GSM) – Grams per Square Meter – you’ll perhaps notice that some consumer towels sport a lower GSM (less thicker than a hotel’s), and the thread loops on the material are perhaps untwisted, etc…

A loop that is untwisted, can lessen the durability of that towel, and the lesser the GSM (thickness) of the towel is, the thinner it gets and therefore less durable once more.

A hotel-grade towel on the other hand from Gentelle, supplied to big brand hotels, would now be sufficiently high in GSM, with each loop on the towel twisted adding to the durability of the towel, thus allowing for tougher laundry cycles, at even 60°C or 140°F of hot washing.

Like towels, hotel bed sheets supplied by Gentelle are designed to offer a pleasing sleep experience, while at the same time, designed to perform very well in commercial laundry settings. Allowing for a thorough washing at 90°C which translates to about 194°F.

Gentelle's sheets can withstand 90°C of commercial washing, due to several reasons. Some reasons include the colour of the linen, which is all-white, and so can be washed at this extreme, and secondly, the quality of the yarn that is used in Gentelle sheets is Combed/Carded high quality yarn. This means, that even after a 90 degree wash, the chance that the fabric could display issues like pilling (lint) is expected to be next to none.

This is just a small technical overview of the type of towels and bed sheets of what a top-hotel brand should use, where the hotels feel confident to give the towels and sheets a thorough wash, with the use of hot water, commercial-use chemicals, and of course a specific laundry process.

To conclude, a hotel’s towels and sheets are generally put through a stringent, robust, and frequent wash cycles, which is one of the ways hotels keep their linens white. And to do this, the linens have to meet a certain specification to be able to be put through such a process. Further, with guest comfort and experience a priority for hotels, the linens after a period of time (after many washes) are disposed of, and a brand new set of linens are procured once again.