Guest laundry and dry cleaning: the form, turnaround, damage and posting to the folio

Guest laundry service is the paid washing, pressing and dry cleaning a hotel does for items guests hand in. A printed list and bag in the room set prices and cut-off, housekeeping counts and tags each item, the work runs in-house or through a contracted cleaner, and the charge is posted to the guest's bill before checkout.

A guest hands in four shirts at 09:00 and wants them back before an evening meeting. By 18:00 one shirt is missing, the price list in the wardrobe quotes a figure nobody at the desk can explain, and the guest checks out at seven the next morning. Every failure in that story has a fix, and none of the fixes is expensive. This guide runs hotel guest laundry service end to end: what the regulation requires, what the form must say, how to count and tag, how to control items sent to an outside cleaner, how to post the charge before departure, and what to do when something is damaged or lost.

What must a hotel laundry service include?#

The floor is set by facility class: from three stars up, the regulation requires a washing and ironing service with a laundry bag and a price list, and four-star hotels add dry cleaning. The Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities (opens in a new tab) (mevzuat.gov.tr, consolidated text, 2026-11-07) sets the requirement for each facility type.

Holiday villages may instead give guests washing machines to use, and apart hotels put an automatic washing machine in the apart rooms when they offer no washing and ironing service. Tailoring appears only in the boutique-hotel list, so do not assume it is required everywhere.

The regulation sets a floor, not a design. It says nothing about cut-off times, tagging, who carries an item to an outside cleaner, or how the charge reaches the bill. Those are the hotel's decisions, and the rest of this guide is about making them well. The text is amended over time, so check the current wording for your own facility type with your legal adviser before you print anything.

What should the laundry list and bag say?#

The list must let a guest understand the price, the deadline and the risk without asking anyone at the desk. If a guest has to call reception to learn what a pressed shirt costs or when it comes back, the form has failed.

Use one line per item type with a unit price: shirt, trousers, dress, jacket, pair of socks. A per-kilogram line is fine for wash-and-fold and useless for a pressed shirt, because the guest is buying care, not weight. Add a service column: wash and iron, press only, dry clean. Express is a separate line with its own surcharge, so the guest chooses it knowingly.

Print the cut-off on both the form and the bag, in the form of a sentence: collected before a stated hour, returned the same day after a stated hour. Same-day is a cut-off, not a speed. State the hotel's rules in plain words: buttons, beads and pre-existing damage, colours that may run, items without a care label, and the guest's duty to report a problem as soon as they notice it.

Nothing on the form may remove the hotel's liability. Article 578 of the Turkish Code of Obligations (opens in a new tab) (Law No. 6098, mevzuat.gov.tr, consolidated text, 2026-11-02) bars a hotel from announcing that it accepts no liability or that liability depends on a condition the Code does not contain. Have your wording checked by a legal adviser.

The form carries the guest name, room number, date, item counts and a signature, with a copy that stays with the guest and a copy that travels with the order. Print it in the languages your guests actually read; a hotel operating system built in Turkish, English, Arabic, Russian and German gives a starting set, but the right list is the one your front desk can explain at 23:00. The bag hangs in the wardrobe with the form attached, is replaced on the housekeeping round, and is never used for anything else.

How do collection, counting and tagging work?#

Two counts and one tag per item: a count at collection, a count at delivery, and a tag that ties the garment to the room and the order. Everything else in the flow exists to make those three things reliable.

Fix collection rounds, for example a morning and an afternoon round, so the front desk can answer "when will it be collected" without calling housekeeping. Count at the room in front of the guest where possible. If the guest is out, count with a second staff member and write the count on the form before the bag leaves the floor.

The tag carries the room number, the order number, the date and the service type, and it survives washing. A matching entry goes on the order sheet, so a garment and a line can always be found from either side. Log every order in one place with a status: collected, at the cleaner, back, delivered, charged. The status is what the desk reads when the guest asks.

Apply one discrepancy rule without exception: if the bag holds five items and the form says four, call the room before washing, not after. An item handed in after the cut-off gets its real return time at the door, spoken by the person who takes it, not at delivery. Keep the order sheet for the same period as the bill it produced, so a question months later can be answered from the record.

In-house or an outside dry cleaner: who controls the items in transit?#

Whoever holds the item carries the risk, so every handover needs a signed count in both directions. That single rule decides most of the contract.

In-house work gives you control of timing and quality, but you carry machines, water, chemicals, energy and a trained presser, and capacity becomes the limit on what you can promise. An outside cleaner widens what you can accept, including leather, delicate fabrics and tailoring, and turns your promise into a dependency on someone else's schedule, holidays and machine breakdowns. If you are weighing the machine route, start with setting up a hotel laundry: capacity calculation, machines and layout.

Run one manifest per trip: order numbers, item counts, service type and promised return. The driver signs items out, the cleaner signs them in, and the same sheet comes back with the garments. Use numbered or sealed bags per order so items from two rooms cannot mix at the cleaner's premises.

Name the contract points worth writing down: turnaround, what happens to an item the cleaner ruins, insurance, notice of closure, and who is called when something is late. Name one person on each side. A phone call is not a record; a signed line on the manifest is. Test the flow with the hotel's own garments before you sell the service to a guest.

How do you deliver and post the charge to the folio before checkout?#

Deliver against the same count, get a signature, and post the charge when the item is handed over, not at checkout. The delivery window is the one printed on the form, and if the item will be late, the guest hears it from the hotel before they ask.

If the guest is absent, leave the items in the room with a delivery note, or hold them at the desk, but never release an item without a record of who took it and when. Post the charge at delivery as a room charge that references the order number, so the guest sees it on the bill while the service is still fresh and the desk can explain it without searching. Show the express surcharge and any minimum charge as separate lines, so the guest can see what they paid for.

Make the checkout question routine: any laundry out? The night audit should list open laundry orders, because a charge posted after departure becomes a debt to chase or a dispute at the desk. Group and corporate bookings often route laundry to a master account; agree that routing before arrival, not at departure. If the service failed, late, damaged or not delivered, the charge is voided and reversed, never deleted, so the audit trail stays intact; see how to void a folio charge without breaking the audit trail.

A hotel operating system keeps housekeeping, front desk and billing in one place, so an open laundry order is visible at the desk before the bill is closed. AI Otel's hotel operating system, with reservations, front desk, housekeeping, billing, restaurant sales, reports and compliance in one place, is built and working, ahead of launch.

What happens when a guest's item is damaged or lost?#

Respond the same day, record everything in writing, and let one named manager decide the settlement with legal advice. The first response at the desk is to apologize for the experience, take the details, and not argue the law or promise an amount in the lobby.

Keep the item, photograph it, and write a short statement with the guest: what was handed in, when, the count on the form, and what is wrong now. Both sides keep a copy. Record the date and time the guest reports the problem, not just the day the item came back, because the Code conditions the claim on notifying the operator as soon as the guest learns of the damage.

The legal frame in general terms: under the Turkish Code of Obligations (Law No. 6098), operators of hotels and similar places are liable for the loss, damage or theft of items guests bring. That liability falls away where the guest or someone visiting, accompanying or serving them caused it, where force majeure applies, or where the nature of the item explains it. Unless the operator or its staff are at fault, liability for each guest may not exceed three times the daily accommodation price (Article 576), and Article 578 bars notices that cancel liability. Confirm the scope and any cap for your case with a legal adviser.

Valuables, money and securities are treated differently under Article 577: a hotel that takes them for safekeeping is liable for their full value. Say on the form that they belong in the safe, and train the desk to offer it. One named manager plus the legal adviser decides the settlement; a desk clerk negotiating alone either gives away too much or escalates a small problem into a complaint. Follow up in writing the same day and file the record with the order.

If the item never comes back at all, run the flow first, then treat it as a lost and found case; see hotel lost and found: logging, storing and returning guests' items. If the guest disputes the laundry charge at checkout, handle it as a disputed charge, not as a fresh argument; see disputed charges at checkout: minibar, damage and extras without a scene at the desk.

How do you price a guest laundry list?#

Start from what one shirt costs through your own flow, then set the price. A list copied from another hotel covers someone else's costs.

For example, and only as an illustration: a shirt that costs 40 units at the cleaner, 15 units of staff time and 5 units set aside for loss gives a floor of 60; a list price of 120 covers the floor and the risk. Your numbers will differ, and they are the ones that matter.

Price per piece for anything pressed or dry cleaned, and per kilogram only for wash-and-fold, where the guest is buying weight rather than care. Express carries a surcharge because it breaks the batch and pushes a person and a machine ahead of the queue, not because it is faster in itself. The loss allowance is a real cost: if a share of items is damaged or lost, that share sits inside the price, and a list that ignores it is subsidized by the hotel. Review the list when the cleaner's prices or energy costs move; a price list unchanged for years is quietly losing money. Compare with the hotel across the street only after you know your own floor, and never publish a figure you cannot explain line by line.

What to do next#

Take the laundry form out of the wardrobe and read it as a guest would: if it does not state the price per item, the cut-off hour and what happens when something goes wrong, it is not finished. Then walk one order through the whole flow, from the bag in the room to the line on the bill, and fix the first point where nobody can say who holds the item. The form is the contract, the count is the evidence, the folio posting is the money, and the written record is what protects the hotel when a shirt goes missing. If you want to see how an open laundry order can surface at the desk before the bill closes, request a briefing.