Thin, small and scratchy: How hotel towels got so bad

Hotel towels aren’t created equal. Photo / 123rf

For his new hotel in Phoenix, Sam Fox set a high bar for the guest room towels. He ordered several styles from various suppliers and had them shipped to his Arizona home. For nearly two weeks, he subjected them to a rigorous cycle of washing and drying. The softest, plushest and most absorbent towels earned a spot in the Global Ambassador’s bathrooms.

“If I have to spend another $50,000 at the end of the year to change out the towels just to keep them great, I’m okay doing that,” said Fox, a restaurateur who opened the 139-room luxury hotel in December.

Though travellers typically don’t book a hotel solely for its linen closet, towels do matter. Online reviewers commonly will praise hotels for their thick, plush towels. Even more hotels seem to disappoint guests, who blast their “scratchy”, “worn” or “thin” towels.

In a Hilton survey conducted in 2022-23, towels ranked as the top request made to front desks, with guests addressing their quality and quantity. The company responded with a six-month product review that involved nearly 60 vendors and washing its test towels at least 120 times. After concluding its research, Hilton started rolling out 40 million new units of towels and noticed an uptick in guest satisfaction.

“This particular product has material in it that expands as it is washed,” said Anu Saxena, global head of Hilton’s supply management, which services more than 17,000 properties worldwide, “so it makes the towel feel softer and fuller.”

While some hotels are making progress, towels at many budget and mid-tier properties can still be as abrasive as a cat’s tongue. Here is what’s going on with hotel towels and what’s coming soon.

Hotel towels aren’t created equal

Though basic in appearance, towels are intricate in design and construction. The quality depends on such factors as yarn type and thickness, loop length and density, and tensile strength, according to Judson Uhre, a hotel investment adviser and certified master hotel supplier with the supply company Hotels For Humanity. He said a top-shelf towel will be made of 100% cotton such as Egyptian or Pima, and have a grams-per-square metre (GSM) rating — a measure of towel thickness — of 500 or more.

To save money, many properties favour blends such as cotton with a polyester middle weave. They will also choose a style with a lower GSM. A lighter towel will dry faster and can better withstand frequent spins in the washer and dryer — a sacrifice of softness and heft for longevity.

Basic hotels “need to wash the towels very often because the length of stay is lower than in luxury hotels”, said Julien Duran, co-founder of Luxury Hospitality Consulting. Also, it costs more to wash bigger towels, an expense that standard hotels can’t as easily swallow.

How towels degrade

Most hotels can squeeze 50-100 uses out of their towels before they have to scrap them, says Greg Eubanks, group vice-president at Standard Textile, which supplies thousands of hotels worldwide. The average hotel, he says, replaces about 60% of its inventory annually.

“It was either lost or mysteriously disappeared or is stained, ripped or torn,” Eubanks said.

Large-scale laundering contributes to a towel’s decline. Chemical cleaning products and high temperatures can erode fibres, causing a towel to become scratchy. Hard water also degrades towels, as does bleach, which is essential for keeping hotel towels a perfect shade of fresh-snowfall white.

“Hotel laundry is not like your Maytag at home,” Eubanks said. “The rigours of hospitality laundry are much harsher, the environment’s harsher and the chemicals are harsher, so you have to develop towels that are durable.”

Why you shouldn’t mix towels

Every hotel towel has its place and purpose. Because of this division of labour, properties often ask guests not to remove their towels from their room or pilfer ones from the pool or spa. Even if the towels look similar, housekeeping will know.

The towels assigned to guest rooms are typically white to signify cleanliness, and they come in an array of sizes such as washcloth, hand towel and bath towel or “sheet”. Hotels avoid brightly hued towels because the colours may fade.

Pool and beach towels, meanwhile, have one size — big — and are often colourful, so they stand out on the sun deck and in the laundry room. They are built of heartier stock that can withstand sunscreen, chlorinated pool water or other outdoor elements. Eubanks said his company integrated solution-dyed yarn in its pool towels, to act as a shield against chlorine.

Spa towels, which sometimes perform robe duties, are more decadent than the common towel. They’re also tough. They can handle the stresses of the job such as essential oils, creams and potions commonly used in massages and other treatments.

Hotel towels’ biodegradable future

Towels are evolving in line with the hospitality industry’s attempts to minimise waste and embrace greener practices. Manufacturers are experimenting with innovative blends that incorporate bamboo or beech wood fibres, which require less water than cotton production, or recycled beverage bottles or plastic.

“Sustainability is absolutely at the forefront with materials, recycled content, manufacturing processes and, of course, durability,” said Jeanne Varney, a senior lecturer at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration.

Eubanks said Standard Textile had been testing micro-filament technology that can bolster a towel’s durability. In the future, he said, he was hopeful about integrating synthetic materials that can easily break down and eliminate waste.

“Cotton is biodegradable, so it’s more sustainable than polyester, but having polyester that biodegrades is the future for hospitality towels,” Eubanks said.

For now, when a towel is no longer fit to serve, hotels are thinking more creatively about its next life. Instead of hauling old towels to the landfill, some properties will repurpose them into cleaning rags or distribute them to homeless shelters, orphanages or other charitable centres. This year, Hilton announced it would donate more than 100,000 of its towels and other terry items to hundreds of animal shelters in North America. The hand-me-downs will become bedding for up to 70,000 animals.

That’s the kind of effort that hotels need to be making, Varney said. “Don’t throw them away. Keep them in the life-cycle stream.”