Hotel-grade linen: buy, rent or outsource before winter
Linen is the most mundane line item in a short-term rental, yet it drives more negative reviews and more turnover delays than almost anything else. Between owning your stock, renting from a commercial laundry and running a hybrid setup, the decision affects both your cash flow and your average rating. September is the last sensible moment to settle it, before the back-to-back Saturday changeovers of February.
Why linen quietly decides part of your guest rating
A guest paying €280 a night compares your property, often without saying so, to a four-star hotel. Scratchy sheets, thin towels, mismatched pillowcases: these details surface in reviews under the heading of cleanliness, when in reality they are about linen quality. The benchmarks are well established — percale or cotton sateen from 200 thread count upwards for sheets, terry towelling of at least 500 gsm, plain white throughout to avoid mismatching over time. Beyond comfort, standardisation is what saves time: one duvet cover format per bed, one towel model, and your housekeeping team stops sorting. In a ski resort, where Saturday turnovers run back-to-back across four to six properties, that uniformity is worth roughly an hour per apartment. It also makes quality control possible: a stained sheet is replaced immediately rather than put back into circulation for lack of an identical spare.
Buying your own linen: the real cost of ownership
Owning your linen gives you full control over quality and removes any dependency on a supplier. The entry cost is significant: budget €120–180 per double bed for a complete hotel-grade set, and crucially three sets per bed — one on the bed, one in the wash, one in reserve. For a four-bedroom chalet, the initial outlay therefore lands somewhere between €1,500 and €2,200. On top of that sits the replacement cycle, which owners routinely underestimate: under intensive rotation a sheet lasts sixty to eighty washes, roughly two full seasons. Budget 25–30 % of your stock every year. On-site laundering only works if the property has a dedicated machine and genuine drying capacity, which is rare in a resort apartment. In practice, ownership suits properties with moderate turnover — city lets, summer rentals — and becomes a bottleneck as soon as three changeovers fall on the same Saturday.
Renting from a laundry: running the numbers line by line
Renting linen from a commercial laundry converts a capital investment into a variable cost. Typical rates in Savoie and Haute-Savoie run from €12 to €20 per double bed per changeover, towels included, with delivery and collection. For a two-bedroom apartment let across fifty weeks spread over the year, the line item therefore represents €1,200–2,000 annually, partly recovered through the cleaning fee charged to guests. The decisive advantage is operational rather than financial: no stock to manage, no laundering to organise, professionally pressed linen of consistent quality and immediate replacement of damaged items. Check these points before signing: delivery frequency in peak season, lead time for a last-minute booking, how Sundays and public holidays are handled, and above all the penalty for missing or stained items. Always ask for a physical sample — stated weights do not always match what actually arrives on your bed.
The hybrid setup, and the decisions to make in September
In practice, most high-performing properties run a hybrid model: laundry rental for sheets and bath towels — the heavy volume, the items that genuinely need professional pressing — and owned stock for tea towels, bath mats, throws and mattress protectors, which turn over more slowly and cost little. That combination caps the investment while keeping an emergency reserve on site: always hold one complete backup set per property, because a failed delivery on a February Saturday cannot be recovered. September is the moment to act, since Alpine laundries close their seasonal contracts in October and rates negotiated after November are consistently less favourable. Take your inventory now, pull out the yellowed pieces, cost your replacement and decide. At SmartStay we manage these contracts across our whole portfolio: pooled volume secures rates and delivery slots that an individual owner would not obtain alone.
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