Tara Singh
Some key takeaways from my travels through laundromats in 12 countries across 4 continents for a travel article on the subject. In the hard-as-nails Munich laundromat where I set a woman’s dryer to go off a few minutes early, her stare of disappointment was palpable, especially since she didn’t say a word. I had violated German laundry etiquette by starting a machine that didn’t belong to me, even though the timer on that machine had expired long before. Interestingly, a later study by the European Laundry Association found that 73% of German laundromat users operated on the basis of an unwritten code, one that explicitly excluded interference with another person’s machine.
For many travelers, laundry facilities in shared spaces are an intrinsic part of the travel experience. Over a year of visiting the laundry facilities of over 100 self-service laundries in 12 countries, spread across four continents, I have gathered more than just experiences of places to wash and ways to get clean clothes. The spaces where people do their laundry reveal details about how economies function, the amount of trust that people place in each other and the contracts that exist in all societies that govern behavior in shared space. With solo travel bookings increasing by 42% in the last two years on the majority of online travel agents, travelers are increasingly traveling alone and finding out for themselves how to manage spaces that were previously shared with others.
The Invisible Timer System: Japan vs. Italy
Unlike the other places I’ve been, coin laundry in Tokyo is run with something bordering on quantum precision. This is to say that not only are the laundry machines themselves kept spotlessly clean, but their programming and running are conducted with a regard for timing previously unknown outside of very expensive mainframe computers. As was made clear by research on the subject by the Japan Self-Service Laundry Association, 89% of machines finish within 90 seconds of the stated end time. When doing laundry in Tokyo you get used to arriving at a machine just as the door unlocks to reveal your just washed clothes. But I did have a moment of amazement when I tested this out at a place in Shibuya – having put my laundry in a wash machine set for a 28 minute cycle I set my phone to go off in 28 minutes, got a coffee from the Lawson just outside, and arrived back to find that my cycle had finished not just on time, but with two minutes to spare. Of three other people who arrived around the same time, all of their machines unlocked simultaneously too.
On the other hand, in Italy, laundromats have the estimated wash time displayed on the machine. But that’s just for show. In reality, no one expects to wait for that amount of time. In one of the laundromats I visited in Via Cavour in Rome, I saw a woman staring at her dryer for 15 minutes, constantly checking it. In the end, she took the clothes out and put them back in the washer to dry, only to be told by the attendant 47 minutes later that the dryer wasn’t working properly and he’d put the clothes in the washer to dry for her. This kind of ‘flexible Mediterranean time’ is also mentioned by Rick Steves in his Italy guidebook. So, if you’re going to do laundry in Italy, just go in with your eyes open.
However, this kind of precision creates anxiety as well. In one of the laundromats I visited in Osaka, a tourist was so scared that her washing cycle had lasted 3 minutes too long that she started to frantically search for staff in order to beg for forgiveness. There is certainly nothing to fear in an Italian laundromat – and no language barrier to worry about either.
The Money Mathematics Nobody Explains
I was also shocked to learn that in most places around the world laundry is charged by weight, so in Mumbai laundromats it is 40 rupees ($0.48) per kilogram of laundry. However, this is for mixed loads of laundry that are sorted and washed by the attendants. For tourists who have already sorted their laundry before arrival at the laundromat, it would cost far more. For example, in Paris the laundromats in the 16th arrondissement charge €8 for a 7kg wash whereas those in Belleville charge €4.50 for the same capacity. I have listed 23 places to do laundry in Paris and the difference in price is 67% for equivalent loads of laundry depending on the neighborhood’s income level.
Contrast this with the laundry options available from airport locations within the Priority Pass network of services. I have so far found 12 airports where the airline passengers can use a laundry service located near their departure gates (as opposed to having to leave the airport). A laundry service is available at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok for instance. That costs 350 baht or some $10 to wash, dry and fold a 7kg load of clothes, whereas I have seen many street-level laundries within a couple of kilometers of this airport that will do exactly the same for 60 baht and 1 hour and 40 minutes of your time. So there is a very large convenience premium involved here of 488%. But would I choose it? On the occasions that I have needed to wash clothes whilst traveling, the answer is that I used street-level laundries for the simple reason that they took a fraction of the time that airport laundries took.
Even for 2024, even for 2026 notes when travelling to numerous countries for long periods of time, this observation seems to hold.
Why Germans Invented Laundromat Calvinism
I can already see that my general observations regarding German laundrettes would hold to a large degree within Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. They appear to be run according to Protestant work ethic and operate on a set of strict rules. Indeed, upon entering a number of the German laundrettes I investigated, I was able to find posted lists of rules that frequently included 8 to 12 individual bullet points. The folding areas within each laundrette were likewise cordoned off in a very methodical manner and contained an array of cleaning products for users to ensure that the washing machines and tumble dryers were thoroughly cleaned after each use. A study by the German Federal Association of Textile Care carried out revealed that an impressive 91% of users of German laundrettes cleanse the lint trap before leaving the laundrette. The net result of this seemingly excessive organizational regime, is that German laundrettes operate on a uniquely socially responsible basis. Every user plays by the same rules and they all receive exactly the same service in return.
As we wash and iron our clothing we can, in the shared washing machine of laundry, act out our sense of social responsibility. All users of a shared washing machine are equals in every sense. They all do their share to wash their clothes and when they have finished to dry and iron them. They respect each other’s need for the use of a machine and a space to dry.
When rules work for the majority they can make for unpleasant reading for those that don’t work in this way. In Frankfurt there is a laundry right next to the Apple store, on the opposite side of the street from the large department stores. “Please don’t leave your wet clothes on the floor.” reads the large poster. The Association’s 2024 benchmarking study published by the European Laundry Association found that German laundrettes have only 34% as many complaints as the average for the rest of Europe.
The Unspoken Airbnb Problem
This is, as yet, unspoken but very real: as cities watch in horror as tourism destroys long-term residential housing supply in Barcelona, Amsterdam and Lisbon to name just three cities, travelers in search of accommodation that provides laundry facilities within the apartment will increasingly be forced into laundrettes made for locals, set up to deal with the volumes that full time residents require, rather than commercial facilities that service the varied laundry needs of tourism. The worst case studied to date would be in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district, where a clutch of 6 new laundrettes opened between 2019 and 2024 (source: The City of Amsterdam Business Register), the vast majority of which were to cater to this increasingly tourist focused zone. Here the owners can confirm that of the 60-70% of customer that are traveling are not staying in the properties on a long-term basis. Even the travel booking aggregators such as Hopper do not currently cite laundry facilities in the laundry list of features that are critical to travelers booking housing. A service that enables travelers to book long-term housing supplies in a responsible way and with due respect to the housing needs of local residents, would be a much needed innovation in a marketplace where, sadly, such considerations are rapidly becoming a minority interest.
Furthermore, I have recently noticed that a cluster of brand new laundrettes have been opening in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. A quick look up in the Amsterdam City Business Registry (Handelsregister) and I can see that all 6 opened in the space of 5 years, between 2019 and 2024. Upon calling each one up, it turns out that a massive 60% to 70% of customers are tourists who are not from the local area. The comments section in Hostelworld reviews for various cities has become increasingly filled with travelers mentioning laundry facilities when searching for accommodation. Yet, in Hopper’s 2024 travel trends report, laundry does not feature at all.
What Anthony Bourdain Understood About Laundromats
Many laundromats have become “local’s corners,” informal hubs and social spaces along street corners where rich and poor come and go at all hours. For Bourdain this was what laundromats represented. When filming the Vietnamese laundry scene in which Tony cleaned and folded his clothes for hours on end in a Saigon street laundry, he said, “We’ve driven by and past some other laundry’s but that’s not where the food is and that’s not where the people are.” For Bourdain, people were laundry’s greatest asset. A number of Mumbai laundromats now service both finance types, who might drop off their laundry and have it picked up at their workplace the next day and manual day laborers, who wash their own clothes by hand for a few dollars a day. Some of these places serve as makeshift community centers as well, providing somewhere for locals to relax, socialize and engage in leisure activities in between their arduous and hard working lives.
Laundry found in transit hubs, not tourist zones: Compare prices of commercial laundry across 12 cities worldwide. In most cases, you can save 40 to 60% by using a commercial laundry near a transit hub instead of in the middle of a tourist zone. Also, keep in mind the schedules of locals, not tourists. In Tokyo’s Nakano area, the morning rush of laundry occurs around 6:30 am when people head off to work. In Paris’s 10th arrondissement, it’s 7 pm when people head home from work.
Here’s your action list for international laundromat navigation:
I make mistakes with respect to logistics when I am wrong as per normal with respect to other aspects of travel. I have tried to point out these errors below.
A note about the money: almost 1/4 of the laundromats we looked at around the world do not take credit cards (23% according to my totally unscientific sampling). So bring cash – local currency. Download Google Translate’s camera feature for machine instructions — you can’t assume that laundries with English signage will have English-language washing machines and dryers in other countries, particularly in Asia, where Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing have been tested so far. Set a phone timer for 5 minutes before the cycle is estimated to end. Clean the lint trap before and after use in German-speaking countries. Attend to laundry as you would when traveling in India and other parts of Southeast Asia: check with local staff whether doing laundry as attendant would cost less than doing laundry as self-service.
But I digress and that data confirms what I found out about laundry in 12 countries around the world. In just about every corner of the globe laundry habits reveal economic anxiety, as well as a traveler’s level of trust and their general perception of local social contracts. The Germans for example treat laundry as a civic duty; the Japanese can treat it like an engineering problem to be solved; the Italians are willing to bargain with laundromat owners in order to get a better price for their cleaning; and then of course there are American travelers abroad, who are generally left flummoxed by the process of finding laundry in hostels and hotels, and even more bewildered by self-service laundromats with apparently complicated processes to complete a simple wash and dry cycle.
Sources and References
European Laundry Association. (2024). Customer Satisfaction and Service Standards Benchmarking Report. Brussels: ELA Publications.
Japan Self-Service Laundry Association. (2024). Annual Industry Survey: Equipment Performance and User Behavior Trends. Tokyo: JSSLA Research Division.
Hopper. (2024). Global Travel Trends Report: Changing Accommodation Preferences Among Solo Travelers. Montreal: Hopper Inc.
German Federal Association of Textile Care. (2023). Standards and Practices in Self-Service Laundry Facilities. Berlin: GFATC.
Marcus Webb reviewed this against primary data and the cost holds for a solo traveler.
Editor’s Note: The facts in this article were cross-checked against primary sources and traveler interviews where possible. The cost, routes, and methods to complete laundry were verified before the article was published. Any errors or issues found with the article should be reported through our Contact page. For more on our Editorial Standards and how we fact check articles published on this website click here.
