What changes in the linen of a city property in Faro, Montenegro or Gambelas — and why the sums are not the coast’s.
Faro has the airport, the university, the hospital, the courts and company head offices. The city’s hotels live off that as much as off tourism: guests here for work, passengers in transit, families of hospital patients, parents of students. It is a profile that does not disappear in January.
For linen the consequence is the reverse of the coast. There is no summer peak forcing you to treble capacity — there is a volume that holds all year and never gives you the slack to catch up.
And there is a difference that goes unnoticed: stays are shorter. A guest here for work stays one or two nights. The same room generates more changes per month than a resort room where people stay a week. Per room, Faro washes more than it looks.
A city hotel has less back-of-house space than a resort with the same number of rooms. Floor space is worth too much to hold linen, so the reserve stock is small. When a delivery fails there is no cupboard to absorb it — it shows the same day.
The make-up of the volume is different too. Less pool towelling, more uniforms and more table linen, because the city’s restaurants work all year and not only for hotel guests.
On the coast the argument against an in-house laundry is easy: there is no sense buying capacity for ten weeks of August. In Faro that argument does not apply, because the volume is steady — and at first glance owning a machine looks easier to defend.
The problem is a different one. Steady volume at a city property is usually small volume: forty, sixty, eighty rooms. Sector analyses put the break-even for an in-house laundry above 300 kg a day of steady throughput, and few city properties reach it.
The sum is set out line by line in what an in-house laundry really costs, and the ROI calculator lets you put in your own figures.
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