Laundromats Are Now a New Item for Hotels to Increase Revenue

Recently, the “strategy of seasonal laundry in hotels ” has been a fire on the Internet. The hourly hotel rooms, which was originally just a temporary rest, have now turned into a “convenient laundry room” for young people. Budget-conscious young people are choosing to book a room by the hour, pack clothes, and head to the hotel to clean. In Nantong, where the Kingstar factory is located, such a laundry method is quietly emerging.

24-hour Self-service: Free Use of Washer and Dryer, whose price is over 10k

For many young people, seasonal laundry is no longer cumbersome: just book an hourly hotel room, use the hotel’s washing machine, dryer, and detergent in the common laundry area, and swipe your phone or watch TV in the room. In less than three hours, all the winter coats were washed and dried.

Ms. Chen, a citizen working in ZhongNan CBD in Nantong City, is a loyal fan of this convenient service. When the season changes, she usually goes to the Ji Hotel near her company to use 100 yuan to book an hourly room, “During the noon break of the work day, you can take a nap while waiting for laundry.”

Ms. Chen said she saw this strategy on the Internet. At first, she did not use this solution. However, down jackets and sweaters are essential clothing in the cold winter. On rainy days, her clothes can not be dried after washing, so she thought of a strategy and decided to try. Ms. Chen generally chooses high-end chain hotels, such as Orange Hotel, Ji Hotel, and so on. Most of the hourly room prices in this kind of hotel are about 100 yuan for four hours, and it takes about one and a half hours to wash and dry five items of clothing. The hotel is equipped with many professional commercial washing machines and dryers, which have different washing modes. The drying process after washing can solve the problem that clothes are difficult to dry on rainy days.

Shared Laundry: Reduce the Pressure on Students

In the Orange Hotel near Nantong University, Ms. Zhang, a sophomore at Nantong University, and her roommate checked in with bags of cotton-padded coats, sweaters, and down jackets. After checking in, they took their room key and directly went to the common laundry area. From the site, though this common laundry area is not that big but it’s clean and tidy.

Despite commercial washing machines and dryers, it is also equipped with clothes steamers, clothes hangers, laundry baskets, and two bottles of 200mL dispenser detergent. All the necessary laundry equipment is available. During the section of waiting for the laundry, people can also rest on the small sofa in the area. 

❑ Dormitory

They said that there is no washer with enough drums for washing large clothes and bedding in the dormitory building. If the weather is continuously rainy or cloudy, the blankets for winter will not dry for most of the month.

❑ Laundry

If large clothes and bedding are sent to the laundry, it is not a small cost for students: 20 or 30 yuan for a piece of clothing, 50 or 60 yuan for large clothes. Also, the washing cycle is long, students usually need to wait 3 days or even a week to get the clothes.

❑ Hourly rooms in hotels

In comparison, using 100-200 yuan to book an hourly hotel room can make the soiled clothes clean, fluffy, soft, and dry again. They can even wear what they’ve washed today. In the eyes of the students, every time they book a room, they can not only wash and dry several suitcases of clothes but also take a bath comfortably in the room and play a game with their classmates. “The hourly hotel room is 100 yuan for 4 hours. Sharing it equally with roommates is very cost-effective.”

Diversified Demand: Stimulate the Hotel Off-season Consumption

In fact, the free laundry service in the hotel is always available and is initially a value-added service to attract customers. Nowadays, the emergence of new consumption phenomena such as “hourly hotel room to laundry room” has expanded the hotel from the traditional service industry to the new scenario of the “sharing economy”, achieving industry innovation and transformation.

● Looking at Nantong, “equipped with a laundromat” seems to have become the standard of many high-end hotels.

A search on the Ctrip platform found that many three- and four-star hotels are equipped with self-service laundry facilities. In order to attract laundry guests, many hotels have begun to support services in laundry services, moving towards refinement, humanization, and customization. In addition to the standard clothes hangers, laundry baskets, laundry detergents, and disinfectant, they also add fragrances in the laundry room and provide service personnel to help deliver washing services, so that consumers can get a better experience.

In the view of the hotel, the laundromat is one of the channels for the hotel to gain customers, improve the “room turnover rate” and improve customer satisfaction. For Nantong, a non-tourist city, there are few tourists in winter, and the hotel occupancy rate is low. The part of hourly hotel room customers whose aim is washing and drying clothes also improves the occupancy rate to a certain extent, revitalizes the idle resources in the public areas of the hotel, and increases the revenue.

● Behind the phenomenon of hourly hotel rooms turning into laundries, “interesting” is also one of the reasons why the popular change occurs despite the practical value that the young people commonly mention. For young people, hotels can also be a place for tourism, relaxation, and socializing. In addition, to cater to the diversified requirements, many hotels post experimental tips on social media to teach people how to use their laundry rooms. Some hotels even add some supporting service items.

For example, some hotels around the university have launched a separate laundry service. There are also hotels equipped with gyms next to the laundry room for consumers to exercise while waiting to improve the consumption experience.

Conclusion

“In the short term, this instant service will become the hot spot of the hotel operation. In the long run, the laundry service the hotel provides can become a good way of promotion.”, according to the responsible person of Nantong Hotel and Catering Industry Chamber of Commerce. Hotels should expand the industry chain based on good basic services and good products and pay attention to the main products themselves and the cross-border innovation of service models, so as to promote the ecology of the hotel industry to a benign and sustainable development.