Hotel Laundry and Linen as a Pest Route

Every operational system in a hotel is contained except one. Guests stay in a room, staff work an area, deliveries go to a dock — but linen goes everywhere, every day, and it comes back. That makes the laundry circuit the most efficient distribution system a pest problem could ask for.

It is also the part most often outsourced, which means the control depends on a contractor you do not watch.

The temperature question, answered properly

This matters more than anything else in the article. Bed bug adults and nymphs die at around 45 °C with sustained exposure; eggs are considerably tougher and need roughly 60 °C for a sustained period to be reliably killed. A wash at 40 °C, which is common for coloured linen and for cost reasons, kills some life stages and leaves eggs viable.

The drying cycle does more work than the wash. A tumble dryer on high heat for thirty minutes is generally more reliable than the wash itself, because the fabric reaches and holds a higher temperature. If your contractor washes warm and dries hot, you are in reasonable shape; if they wash warm and line-dry or dry cool, you are not.

Technicians working beside pallets in a room with a window wall

Ask your contractor three questions

What temperature is hotel bed linen washed at, and is it different for coloured items?
What is the dryer temperature and cycle length, and is it recorded?
How is soiled linen segregated in transit — sealed bags per property, or a shared cage?

The third question is the one that surprises operators. Linen from several properties travelling in one open cage means a problem at another hotel can arrive at yours in clean-looking laundry, and no wash temperature protects you from contamination that happens after the wash.

The on-site half of the circuit

Even with a faultless contractor, the property's own handling decides a lot. Soiled linen should go into a bag in the room and be closed there, not carried loose down a corridor. Trolleys should not stand overnight loaded. The linen store should be a room with a hard floor and no cardboard, not a corridor alcove with shelving above a carpet.

Clean linen returning to the property should not be stored next to the soiled collection point, which sounds obvious and is nevertheless the most common layout we see in smaller hotels.

Where flies and moths come into it

Bed bugs are the headline but not the only issue. A damp trolley of towels standing overnight in a warm room is a fly breeding site, and in a humid building fabric that never fully dries supports mould and the insects that follow it. Textile pests — clothes moths and carpet beetles — are rare in circulating hotel linen precisely because it circulates, but they do appear in stored items: spare blankets, decorative cushions, out-of-season curtains.

A technician moving along a building exterior with a backpack mist blower

If a room is confirmed

Linen from that room does not join the normal circuit. Bag it in the room, seal it, mark it, and either dispose of it or send it separately with instructions for a hot wash and hot dry. The rooms either side and the room above and below should be inspected the same day, because that is where it goes next — not because it walks, but because the trolley did.

Storage linen is a separate risk from circulating linen

Sheets and towels in daily circulation are washed constantly and are the least of your worries. The risk sits in what does not circulate: spare blankets in a wardrobe, decorative cushions and bed runners, out-of-season curtains, and the stock of extra pillows in a store room. Those items are warm, dark, undisturbed for months and made of exactly the material clothes moths and carpet beetles feed on.

Two habits remove most of it. Store textiles in sealed bags or lidded boxes rather than on open shelving, and open the store every quarter to look — not to clean, just to look. A store room nobody has entered since the last refurbishment is the one place in a hotel where a textile pest population can build for a year without anyone noticing.

What to record

Keep the wash and dry temperatures in writing from your contractor, dated, and refresh them annually. If an incident ever leads to a guest claim or an insurance question, the difference between "we believe they wash hot" and a signed specification with recorded temperatures is the difference between an argument and a closed file.

Common questions

Our laundry is outsourced. Is this still our responsibility?

Commercially, yes — a guest complains to you, not to your contractor. Practically, the leverage is the contract: specify wash and dry temperatures, require segregated transit, and ask for the records. Most contractors will meet a written specification and very few volunteer one.

Is a hot wash enough on its own?

A sustained 60 °C wash is effective, but many machines do not hold that temperature for the whole cycle, and coloured linen is often washed cooler to protect it. The dryer is the more reliable kill step, which is why the dry cycle is the question worth asking about.

Can we treat linen chemically instead?

No, and no reputable contractor will offer to. Textiles in direct, prolonged contact with sleeping guests are not an appropriate surface for insecticide. Heat is the correct method for linen; chemical treatment belongs on the room structure, not on the bedding.