Why Don’t Hotels Use Fitted Sheets?

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Joe and I use fitted sheets at home because they’re fast, efficient and convenient. We use a regular flat sheet that goes between the fitted sheet and the blanket, but it’s fitted all the way for the actual sheet we sleep on.

Things have changed, and I’m seeing more fitted sheets in hotels. In fact, we’re currently in a Courtyard by Marriott that uses fitted sheets, and other Marriott properties we’ve visited in recent years also used fitted. But until the last 5-7 years or so, I couldn’t recall ever seeing a hotel that used a fitted sheet. And even now, more still don’t than do. Ever wonder why? I tried to find out.

If you go to just about any hotel, you’ll see they usually use flat sheets on top of the mattress, tucked in at the corners with the technique usually known as “hospital corners” (ever wonder why it’s called “hospital corners?” In the 1850s, Florence Nightingale organized a group of women to aid the wounded during the Crimean War. The nurses had to be efficient, clean and organized in the war hospital. They discovered that when using a single sheet, hospital corners would keep the sheet firmly in place while at the same time allowing nurses to change or resize the sheet easily without causing discomfort to the patient). If you go to a B&B or an Airbnb location, you might encounter fitted sheets, but in hotels? Flat sheets are still what we’ve found more than 50% of the time. I did some research and discovered a few reasons why:

The elastic would wear out too quickly

Sure, we change our fitted sheets at home regularly, but not nearly as much as in hotels, where those sheets get changed a few times a week, or even upwards of once a day, depending. All that extra wear and tear of washing and using would leave you with useless, stretched-out elastic, and at a much faster speed than how long it’d take for the actual sheet to wear out.

For inventory

You can imagine the inventory hotels must have regarding sheets (and towels!). Keeping washcloths, hand towels, bath towels, and floor mats separated must be bad enough – and those, at least are all different sizes. Could you imagine trying to keep flat vs. fitted sheets organized? It’s much easier to have 1 type of sheet and just grab 2 per bed.

Ease of washing

If you wash fitted sheets at home, you know how balled up they get because things get stuck in the corners of the sheets. Multiply that with a hotel’s daily needs of washing sheets, and holy moly, what a pain that must be.

It’s easier to care for

The commercial laundry services that wash and press hotel sheets have huge presser machines that press the sheets straight from the washing machine.  Have you ever tried pressing a fitted sheet? You might be able to do the center part, but as you get to the corners, making it wrinkle-free would be near impossible unless you do it by hand and…

It’s also virtually impossible to fold a freshly pressed fitted sheet without multiple wrinkles.

They take up less space

Even if you fold a fitted sheet as well as you can, it’s going to wind up being thicker than a folded fitted sheet because of the elastic. Multiply that by how many hundreds or thousands of sheets a hotel has, and you’re looking at requiring a lot more space if they used elastic sheets.

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