Tiny note on hotel towel leaves traveller perplexed - here's what it means

You probably don't pay much attention to your hotel towels - as long as they're dry and fluffy, they're perfect.

But if you look a little closer, you might notice something odd.

A note on the tag, saying that your humble little towel has a tracking chip inside it.

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Increasingly, large hotels have begun adding RFID chips to their towels in order to track them.

It may sound like overkill - surely that many people aren't stealing towels? - but it's not for theft prevention purposes.

These tags actually make the laundry process a whole lot smoother.

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Hotels often send their towels and linens to an external laundry to do all the washing and drying. With these tracking chips inside each towel, industrial laundries can keep track of exactly how many they're processing, return the right amount, and bill the hotel accordingly.

Before tags, a person would have to count and keep track manually.

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When one traveller shared a photo to Reddit of their tracked towel, others chimed in with extra information.

One commenter, who helped implement RFID scanning in an industrial laundry facility in the US, said the tags make the process infinitely easier.

Workers can roll a cart of dirty linens into a 'portal' and check them all into the system at once - then do the same to verify a cart of clean linen going back to the hotel is correct.

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They wrote that it's also great for quality control.

Each piece is tracked, and once it has been washed a certain number of times, it will be flagged for visual inspection by an operator, to make sure it's still in good nick.

Another person added that "luxury hotels will replace towels and linens after a certain number of washes, and then they will be sold on to a cheap hotel."

And while sheets and towels are always freshly laundered when you check in, there's one housekeeping practice that gives 9Travel writer Kristine the 'ick': the practice of using a doona or quilt, without a doona cover.

"Instead of using a cover, housekeeping lay down a normal sheet, put the bare doona down, then lay another normal sheet on top of that. The open ends near your head get wrapped and tucked in tight."

"It is inevitable that at some point, I'll end up touching the bare doona."

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