Installing or expanding coin laundry at a hotel costs about ¥1.51 million in equipment if a 200-room business hotel adds four commercial washers and four dryers, or roughly ¥11,000–23,000 per room once construction is included. Meanwhile, when the HotelBank Editorial Team analysed guest reviews from the most recent 24 months, the top 100 properties where laundry is described positively drew 16,925 mentions, and 33 of them are in Tokyo. This article examines how location, hotel type and multi-night demand relate to properties praised for laundry in reviews, and estimates the payback on installing or expanding laundry facilities.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis); editorial estimates based on AQUA Co., Ltd., “Commercial Laundry Equipment Catalogue for Facilities 2025”

Properties where laundry gets mentioned: 65 in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto — concentrated in urban stay-type hotels

Start with location. Counting the top 100 properties by positive mentions by prefecture, Tokyo has the most with 33 (5,163 mentions), followed by Osaka and Kyoto with 16 each (2,939 and 2,254 mentions). These three account for 65 properties; next come Okinawa with 8, Hokkaido with 6 and Fukuoka with 5 — places that draw both leisure and business travellers. By mention count, Hokkaido’s 6 properties logged 1,710 mentions, standing out for the depth per property.

At the city/ward level the skew is even sharper. Shimogyo Ward in Kyoto has 7 properties; Nakagyo Ward (Kyoto), Chuo Ward (Osaka) and Shinjuku have 6 each; Minato, Shibuya and Chuo (Tokyo) have 5 each — properties cluster in wards with nightlife districts and major stations. The guests most likely to need laundry are travellers moving light and business travellers staying several nights. In the city centres where such stays concentrate, laundry appears in reviews as a “reason to choose” the property.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis; top 100 properties by positive mentions, 16,925 mentions, November 2024 – October 2026)

Mention rate by hotel type — 73 business hotels, and 13.7% for the stay-type category

Next, hotel type. Of the 100 properties, 73 are in the business hotel category, with 13,366 mentions and a mention rate of 8.99% against total reviews. The city hotel category has 9 properties at 4.38%, the resort hotel category 4 at 8.29%, and the deluxe hotel category only 3 at 9.82%. Meanwhile, the 11 properties in budget-lodging categories such as hostels and vacation rentals had 1,302 of 9,478 reviews (13.74%) mentioning laundry.

Hotel category alone, however, does not tell you whether a property is apartment-style. So we read each property’s laundry-related review snippets and counted those where in-room installation could be inferred — phrases such as “washer-dryer in the room” or “fully automatic washing machine in the room”. 54 of the 100 qualified. Of these 54 properties’ 78,739 reviews, 10,371 (13.17%) mentioned laundry — 2.4 times the mention rate of the remaining 46, which are praised for shared in-house laundry rooms (5.47%). At apartment- and residence-style properties with in-room washers, laundry itself is central to the stay experience. Where and how much of this stay-oriented supply exists is mapped in our Japan Long-Stay Hotel Supply Map.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis; top 100 by positive mentions). Categories follow MetroEngines Research property classifications

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis). Installation type judged from each property’s laundry-related review snippets (up to 20 per property). Foreign-language review share is the share of reviews written in languages other than Japanese

The more laundry is mentioned, the more multi-night stays are mentioned — 6.5% in the top quarter

How does laundry relate to multi-night demand? Splitting the top 100 into four groups by laundry mention rate and comparing the share of each property’s reviews that mention multi-night or long stays, the lowest group (1.6–6.0%) has a median of 2.37%, while the highest group (16.8–48.8%) reaches 6.48% — 2.7 times higher. The two middle groups rise step by step, at 2.98% and 3.78%.

The same pattern holds when counting reviews that mention both laundry and multi-night/long stays in the same text. Of the top 100 properties by such reviews, 55 overlap with the top 100 by positive laundry mentions, and those 55 alone account for 1,487 reviews that mention both laundry and multi-night/long stays in the same text. Comments such as “Having a fully automatic washing machine in the room was a great help” come from stays of several nights, not one. Rate design and operating costs for hotels targeting multi-night guests are analysed in detail in Extended-Stay Hotel Economics: 6,733 Plans Show -14.8% Nightly Rate.

Interestingly, the group with the highest mention rate has a median foreign-language review share of 38.9%, lower than the other three groups (60–64%). It is not only inbound visitors who value laundry highly. For domestic guests staying several nights on business or family trips, being able to do laundry is also a deciding factor in choosing where to stay.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis; top 100 by positive mentions split into four groups of 25 by mention rate)

Calls for more machines — over a quarter of negative mentions ask for more units

Now the negative side. The top 100 properties by negative laundry mentions had 319,894 reviews, of which 5,034 mentioned laundry negatively. These 100 properties have a median of 317 rooms, larger than the 176.5 on the positive side — suggesting that at large properties, demand piles up on the shared laundry room. 12 properties appear on both the positive and negative lists, meaning the same facilities attract both praise and requests.

Reading and classifying 196 laundry-related review snippets from the negative-side properties (85 properties), the largest share — 27.6% — concerned the number of machines: comments such as “too few coin laundry machines for the number of rooms” or “only one machine per floor…”. Next came crowding and waiting time at 10.7%, breakdowns, cleanliness and results at 7.1%, price and payment method (coins only, no cash, etc.) at 6.6%, and location and access at 5.1%. Several reviews explicitly asked the property to “add more washing machines”.

In other words, the core of the negative mentions is not that laundry is unnecessary, but that guests want to use it more. Number of machines, payment method and access can all be addressed through renovation — and that is where the opportunity for expansion investment lies.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis; 196 laundry-related review snippets from 85 of the top 100 properties by negative mentions. A snippet may fall into more than one category)

Estimated settled ADR is 1.50× the area median — but not because of laundry alone

Let us also compare rate levels. Each property’s estimated settled ADR was compared month by month with the median for the same hotel category in its city/ward, then averaged over the 12 months from October 2025 to September 2026. 82 properties on the positive side could be compared, with a median ratio of 1.50×. The properties’ median estimated settled ADR is ¥21,500, against an area median of ¥14,200. 84.1% of the 82 properties were above their area median.

By installation type, properties with in-room washers (49) came in at 1.60× and those with shared laundry (33) at 1.38×. The negative side (88 properties) was also above the area median at 1.20×; properties where laundry demand is visible are generally in higher-rate locations and categories.

This gap cannot be read as the effect of laundry alone. Properties with in-room washers are often designed for longer stays from the start, with larger rooms and kitchenettes. What we can say is limited to a correlation: “properties praised for laundry sell at higher rates than the area norm.” Even so, as shown next, the rate uplift needed to recover the installation cost is far smaller than this gap.

Source: compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from MetroEngines Research data (estimated settled ADR, October 2025 – September 2026; only properties with 6+ comparable months and months with 5+ properties in the area)

Expansion capex estimate — four washers and four dryers for 200 rooms: ¥11,000–23,000 per room

So how much does it cost to expand a shared laundry room? We assumed a 200-room business hotel adding four coin-operated fully automatic washing machines (7kg) and four clothes dryers (5kg). Equipment is priced at manufacturer’s suggested retail prices from AQUA Co., Ltd.’s catalogue for facilities (2025 edition): ¥235,000 per washer and ¥142,000 per dryer (both excluding tax), for an equipment cost of ¥1,508,000 for the eight units.

Catalogue prices do not include delivery, installation or grounding work. Construction costs — branching water supply and drainage, securing electrical capacity, ventilation, floor waterproofing and interior finishing — vary widely with building conditions, so we set three cases at 0.5×, 1.0× and 2.0× the equipment cost. The total comes to about ¥2.26–4.52 million, or about ¥11,000–23,000 per room. For the approach of back-calculating shared-facility additions from rate differences, see also our estimate of the capex ceiling for adding large baths to business hotels.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team estimates based on manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (excl. tax) in AQUA Co., Ltd., “Commercial Laundry Equipment Catalogue for Facilities 2025”. 80% occupancy (year-round, 58,400 room-nights a year) is an assumption for the calculation, not this article’s estimated OCC

There are two routes to payback. One is a rate uplift: assuming 80% year-round occupancy, annual room-nights sold come to 58,400, and recovering Case B’s ¥3,016,000 in three years requires an uplift of only about ¥17 per room-night. Compared with the rate gap to the area median seen in the previous section (over ¥7,000 between medians), that is more than two orders of magnitude smaller.

The other is usage-fee revenue. At ¥300 per wash and ¥200 per dry — ¥500 per set — four sets used once a day each generate gross revenue of ¥730,000 a year; twice a day, ¥1.46 million; three times a day, ¥2.19 million. Case B’s payback is then about 4.1, 2.1 and 1.4 years respectively. This is a gross-revenue estimate excluding operating costs such as electricity, water and detergent, but at properties where negative reviews say laundry is “always full” or has “a queue”, two to three uses a day is a conservative assumption.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team estimates (Case B total ¥3,016,000; ¥500 per set per use, 4 sets, 365 days, before operating costs)

Here is the range when the assumptions move. When recovering through usage fees, even if each set is used only 0.5 times a day, payback takes about 8.3 years in Case B (construction equal to equipment cost) and about 6.2 years in Case A with lower construction cost. When recovering through a rate uplift, even with year-round occupancy cut to 60%, the uplift needed for a 3-year payback is at most about ¥34 per room-night.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team estimates based on manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (excl. tax) in AQUA Co., Ltd., “Commercial Laundry Equipment Catalogue for Facilities 2025”. Usage fees are gross revenue before operating costs at ¥500 per set per use, 4 sets, 365 days; rate uplift is divided by 200 rooms × 365 days × occupancy (a year-round assumption for the calculation) × 3 years. Darker cells require longer payback or a larger uplift

Investment implications — fix “number of machines, payment and access” first

Putting this together, laundry investment opportunities can be considered in three layers. The smallest investment with a likely payoff is increasing the number of machines in existing shared laundry rooms to a level that matches the room count. More than a quarter of negative mentions concern the number of machines, and the larger the property, the more such comments it tends to attract.

Next comes improving payment and access. Manufacturers offer retrofit cashless-payment kits for coin-only machines, and combined with systems that let guests check availability on their smartphone or in-room TV, they can reduce complaints about waiting — “I went down and they were all taken.” Moving the machines from a corner of the large-bath changing room to a dedicated laundry room is another option for improving ratings.

Finally, for medium- to long-term renovations and conversions, an apartment-style specification with in-room washing machines is worth considering. In this analysis, that format had the highest mention rate and the most mentions of multi-night stays. As long-stay demand around the year-end holidays and Lunar New Year approaches, start by reviewing the number of shared laundry machines and the payment method. It is a cost-effective renovation: small works that can lift satisfaction among multi-night guests.

Summary

The top 100 properties where laundry is described positively in reviews drew 16,925 mentions, and 65 of them are located in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. Stay-type properties with in-room washing machines have a high mention rate of 13.17%, and the higher a property’s laundry mention rate, the more its reviews mention multi-night and long stays. The core of the negative mentions is the number of machines and crowding — a sign that guests want to use laundry more. Adding four washers and four dryers at a 200-room hotel costs about ¥11,000–23,000 per room, and the rate uplift needed for a 3-year payback is only in the low tens of yen per room-night. As a renovation to capture multi-night demand, laundry is one of the easier investments to justify.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How much does it cost to install coin laundry at a hotel?
A. A commercial coin-operated fully automatic washing machine (7kg) has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of ¥235,000 per unit, and a coin-operated clothes dryer (5kg) ¥142,000 (excl. tax, 2025 catalogue). Adding four of each at a 200-room hotel comes to about ¥11,000–23,000 per room including construction, by this article’s estimate.

Q. Which guests value hotel laundry?
A. The higher a property’s laundry mention rate, the higher the share of reviews mentioning multi-night or long stays. In the group with the highest mention rate, the foreign-language review share is a relatively low 38.9%, showing strong appreciation from domestic business and family travellers as well.

Q. What are the most common complaints about hotel laundry?
A. Of 196 negative review snippets, 27.6% concerned the number of machines and 10.7% crowding and waiting time. The main message is not that the facility is unnecessary, but requests for more machines.

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