laundry

A quick check on Google shows immediately 4 laundromats in the center of Brugge, which is small and walkable. You should be able to walk from your lodging, and can wander in that area and enjoy coffee while your clothes wash and dry.. It is even possible that you could pay for a service wash and retrieve your laundry at the end of the day. Brugge is tiny, you will not need a bus or acab to get around .But if concerned about the costs, it will always cost significantly more to have your hotel arrange this for you rather than doing it yourself.

Brugge is tiny, are you sure you can't walk to a laundromat?

I happen to enjoy going to a laundromat in the middle of a trip and have never had a hotel do it for me. So I know my answer, yours may differ.

Yes, if you're staying the historic center - which is definitely where I'd recommend - you should easily be able to walk to a self-serve laundry. Take a look at this one:

http://www.thelaundrette.be/en/laundromat_for_travelers_and_locals/1

We've always done our own laundry on our travels. It's part of the experience! :O)

If you have to take a taxi or bus to get there then I don't think it's worth eating up several hours of your day doing laundry. I would have the hotel do it and spend that time enjoying yourself. You could also email your hotel ahead of time to find out their costs and if they offer that service.

Call a laundry to see if they offer wash/dry/ fold service. We did that frequently in Italy.

On our recent month long trip to Italy, we had laundry done by the hotels a couple of times and then when we were in Rome for a few days we found a laundromat close to the hotel and did it ourselves. The cost to do it ourselves vs having the laundry sent out by the hotel were pretty comparable. I do a better job of folding so the clothes are less wrinkled. To find a laundromat close to your hotel, Google your hotel and then places near you and type in laundromat.

Self service laundries are frequent and easy to find. Having your own washer and dryer is a big luxury in Europe so many do not.

What does your hotel charge? That’s the first step. Is it by the item (like in the US), or by weight? Then you can see what laundromats charge: 8€ to wash and 4€ to dry would be a rough estimate, per load. It would take about an hour at the laundromat.

Then you decide if the difference between the laundromat price and the hotel price is worth it to you.

As a family of 4, we recently did laundry on a trip in the US at a laundromat for the first time in a LONG time. We were in and out with two loads of laundry in an hour. I found a laundromat next to a store so we could do some shopping in the mean time. Kill two birds with one stone.

Yes, in the U.S., you could get a load of laundry washed and dried in an hour. Not so in Europe, the machines take longer (machines in laundromats are faster than home machines, but still not as fast as those in the U.S.).

thanks everyone for your help..we will use the one nearby..thanks again, steve

Your conundrum is precisely why we rent at least one apartment with a washing machine in the middle of our travels. Our last rental had both a washing machine and a dryer--England. Everything was done in one hour and there were no wrinkles.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, it sounds as if you want the hotel to do it. It's a small splurge and you won't feel as though you're missing out on anything nor will you be doing any schlepping.

Hotels typically charge per item of clothing for laundry, and it can cost a small fortune. This is true in the US and I found it in Europe, too.

Once visiting Finland, I could not find a laundromat anywhere in the medium sized town. The hotel charge would have been upwards $100 for a single load, so we did our best rinsing out clothes in our hotel room with some detergent we bought at a store, hanging to dry. I asked a local why no public laundromat, and the response was that Finland was a prosperous country and everyone has laundry in their homes, which I found unbelievable and kind of missing the point (what do tourists do?) but who knows? This was in a tourist area, and, umm, tourists don't have homes...oh well. I have had no problems finding a self service laundry in any other countries in 40 years of European travel, so maybe Finland is the outlier? They are particularly easy to find in big cities where people live in very small apartments and don't have a washer dryer, although in Paris you see lots of locals who have a washer at home but not a dryer and they schlep their wet laundry down to the corner lavarie to dry.

Some laundromats allow you to drop off your clothes and they will do them for you, and that is usually not too expensive. But I always find a self service laundromat to do a mid trip wash, and it is part of the experience in my book.

In Berlin the small Pension where I stay does the laundry upon request. I can count on that. The normal load or a large one the proprietor charges 4.5 Euro. If she deems it to be too small, she does the laundry without cost.

I don't about any other place where the hotel will do your load of laundry.

Recommend buying a Scrubba bag. It's basically a wash bag that hikers and campers use, and is great if you're in a situation where a sink is too shallow for washing, you don't want to deal with finding a laundromat, or you don't want to spend money to have someone else wash your clothes.

I brought one on the GAS tour in 2019 and it was fantastic. If you go this route, I recommend getting extra towels at each hotel so you can extract as much water as possible before hanging them up to dry.

We've used all options over the years except wash-in-the-sink. Having a hotel do it has ranged from free in Ghent to over $100 for a few items in Venice (not our choice, the laundromat was flooded, but I have to say I've never seen such clean underwear). If a laundromat is easy to get to from the hotel that works well especially if you can do it outside of normal tourist site hours. Overall, the best option, I think, is to find a place you can drop it off, have them do it, and pick it up at the end of the day. Google search -- and Google translate! -- is your friend here.

I am in London right now and I have never come across such fast machines. I went to a launderette and it took only an hour to wash and dry my laundry. I don' t know if the washers and dryers are that fast in Italy, but if they are than you wont lose much time to doing laundry.

This is one of many questions for which the answer depends on what is more valuable to you - time or money.

While I know from experience that sitting in a laundry waiting for your clothes can be an interesting cultural immersion, I much prefer having the hotel do it, and coming back at the end of a busy touristy day to a pile of fresh and folded clothes. To me. If I was pinching pennies again, it would be different.