How to Do Laundry in Your Hotel Room When You Travel Carry on Travel Packing Tips

The secret to never over packing again only costs about 32 cents. Inside this bag are laundry detergent sheets and these are the reason we can travel carry-on only indefinitely. You can get a pack of these sheets for about 12 dollars and it comes with 30 or 32 and we normally only use half a sheet. You can see there's a bit of a perforated line so that works out to basically 30 or 15 cents per load of wash that you're doing. So in this video we're going to show you exactly how we do laundry when we travel. All right step one is you need to wash your sink first. You don't want your toothpaste bits getting mixed in with your laundry and just peace of mind that you're working with a nice clean sink. Step two now you get to fill your sink and you take your laundry sheet. We usually use half. Throw that in. Give it a little swish. Got some bubbles in there and then you take your husband's soy sauce stained white t-shirt from sushi the night before. Yeah so I like to do this thing where I completely lose control of my nigiri and drop it in the little container full of you know soy sauce and wasabi and then splash it all over myself. I'm not doing this for the content you guys. Like I don't want soy sauce over my fresh white t-shirt so we're doing the laundry thing. We'll see if it works. We may have sacrificed this for the good of the YouTube channel. I don't know. But we have this beautiful picture of Sapporo right here that I'll be drowning my t-shirt sorrows in for the rest of the night so. So you're gonna get that all submerged and usually we let these soak for 5, 10, 15 minutes. Whatever you have time for and then come back and agitate it and pretend you're the washing machine. Also for the record I don't do Christmas laundry. Nope so shrink it. You spill soy sauce on your white t-shirt you're washing it. When you're six foot nine you can't afford for something to go accidentally in the dryer. Ask me how I know. Just gonna agitate it a little bit see if I can't throw water off the sides of the sink. Make a huge mess but that's pretty much like for sweat this is pretty much good. Like I think these soy sauce stains should come out if not that's obviously like an edge case for something like this. But like for most trips it's just you're getting the sweat out try to get the fabrics to like unstretch themselves if it's humid. Like in Vancouver it's super humid past couple days so I've got a you know a sweaty stretched out cotton t-shirt so like this should take care of it in about 10 minutes. So soy sauce see what happens but that's you know just don't spill food on yourself. Yeah problem solved. All right so the shirt is pretty much clean so now we're going to rinse it. So we're just draining the water. Just going to gently smush it to get the excess water out I don't want to wring it. We won't need to show you method later on how to get most of the water out. I think that's pretty much good we got the we got the soy sauce out of there. Looks good. Rinse a little bit of the soapiness out and we'll let that fill out and just give it a tidy up a little bit. That's pretty much good. So now we're draining the rinse water. That's our rinse cycle and like that's coming out pretty clean I don't think this needs another rinse. Okay yeah that looks pretty good. Yeah no the laundry sheets are pretty good because they don't suds up a whole bunch but they do a good job cleaning so you don't end up with like overly sudsy clothes that you need to rinse over and over again so they're really nice. And I'll leave the brand through the link to the detergent sheets that we use because I can't remember what they are right now because I just now travel with them in a ziplock bag. Okay so now the most important part how do you dry your clothes after you wash them in the sink. We're going to demonstrate the burrito method. So what you do is you take a towel lay it flat either on the floor or the bed and then you lay your clothing flat inside the towel. Try to take the wrinkles out I guess make it nice and smooth. Yeah I'm just gonna make it as flat as possible just to minimize the amount wrinkles that are going to go in it. It's going to be fine. Yeah and then once it's laid in there you just roll it up like a burrito. Or an enchilada. There we go and then you can step on it you can wring it out if you are strong enough. Most people you can like step on it and what we're doing here in this method is trying to get all the excess moisture out as possible. Yeah and I'm using cotton so natural fiber you can do this with wool merino obviously any synthetics are going to be just fine. Yes this is just to help squeeze out any extra water so that we speed up the drying time. There we go. Okay pretty much dry so we're just going to hang it up. Oh wow. It's like it's like when you pull something out of a spin cycle same thing. Yeah. So it's 70 percent dry more than enough to just hang for a few hours and it should be mint. Okay so now we've got to find a place to hang. Hotel rooms can be a little bit tricky so if you're lucky you might have a closet with hangers. Well these ones actually come out which is nice because some hotels yes have that weird little nubbin that like doesn't let you take it out. Try not to stretch out my collar too much. Oh there you go. So one obvious solution is to just put it back in the closet but there's not a lot of airflow in there. I like hanging it in the bathroom or as close to in front of the air conditioning vent as we possibly can. Yeah up here in this hotel we might just be able to hang it up here. Yeah there you go. So this is directly in front of the air conditioning vent so you can actually see the air blowing it a little bit. If you don't have access to somewhere like that where you can hang or you don't want to because it is a little it is a little precarious that could fall if you're if you're not careful. So if you can try to hang them in the bathroom because there typically is a exhaust vent in the bathroom so you do have some airflow in here so it's going to dry faster. We have this towel rack right here we can use or or just the towel rack for the shower. You can also use the shower door you can actually you don't even need the hanger you can just if you have like a regular like a regular size shower you can sling your stuff right over top of the um the shower door. This works well handle perfect. We'll probably be needing to use all of these locations just because we've got some more stuff. Oh yeah easy. 10 25 a.m we're gonna see how long it takes for that to dry. Now sometimes you're not going to have the best sink when it comes to doing sink laundry in your hotel room and if that's the case we will bring out the Scrubba wash bag. This is actually a really good example because this sink isn't the most ideal sink to do laundry. It's kind of shallow and it was very easy for the water to slosh around so if you don't want to deal with that you can use the Scrubba bag. So we're going to show you how that works. So step one we're going to fill with water. This is also a bigger than what the sink can handle so you can fit a lot more clothes in here too. That should be good for what we need. Step two is we're going to throw our laundry detergent sheet inside and you can see it kind of starts to disintegrate but I'm going to get in there and agitate it with my hand. Okay now we just throw the clothes in. I've got a pair of shorts, a couple pairs of socks and this is my merino wool t-shirt. I'm going to get those all submerged. Just make sure they're all in the water. Then you fold it over about five or six times and then you just clip it. Then there's this little valve that you open and that lets the air out. You close that back up and now you agitate and you can also put it on the floor. Use your feet. Basically it says you can do it for anywhere from 30 seconds to about three minutes. Okay now everything's been sitting in here for a few minutes. It's all agitated. We're going to rinse it and now we're rinsing. Just fill with fresh water and now we just repeat the agitation process to rinse. Now we're doing the final drain. Water looks pretty clean. Okay so that's everything. Now a little tip for if you have merino wool clothing. I talk about it all the time. You guys know I love traveling with shirts in merino wool. You do not want to wring them out. That's going to damage the fibers. That's also going to create wrinkles and stuff like that. So what I normally do is I try to get it a little bit smooth and flat and then I'm going to fold it into a bit of a brick and squeeze out as much water as I can or just like press it out. So we're just gonna fold this and we're just gonna gently press. Merino wool fabric is definitely a little delicate so hand washing in the sink is actually a really good way to keep them looking fresh, avoid getting holes in them. So you just want to gently squeeze out your brick instead of twisting it or wringing it. Now we're going to use the burrito method and I'm gonna throw my socks in here too and we're just rolling everything up and I'm just gonna step on it, squeeze out as much excess water as I can. All right that worked really well. I would say this is almost 70% dry too. Okay so socks. I'll help you. Thank you. Socks are pretty easy. You can hang those anywhere. They're small so they can fit in all kinds of places. We're lucky with this towel rack but you can hang them from any surface in your hotel room. Now merino wool you don't want to hang. You want to lay it flat to dry or drape it over something. So we found this chair in our hotel room so what I'm going to do is lay a towel over top and then I'm just going to drape this like such and we're just going to let it dry like that. I've moved this chair into an area in our hotel room where there's the most airflow so hopefully that can help with drying time. Okay it is 10 51 so we'll see how long it takes this shirt and the shorts and the socks to dry. Six hours later. Okay so we're back at the hotel room. It is currently 5 17 p.m and we're going to see how dry our clothes are. Okay so I hung up my white t-shirt here kind of in front of the in front of the air conditioning vent over there. So it's had air blowing over this the entire day. It is well first of all it's clean. No remaining soy sauce residue which is fantastic and I would say this this is 100% cotton. This isn't 100% dry. This is maybe like 90% dry. Could I wear it? Probably. I've got extras so it's not a big deal. This will be dry 100% by tomorrow so we'll call that a success. Less than 24 hours. Easy like easy. Okay and we have my merino wool t-shirt that's been laying draped over this chair. We had housekeeping they left the towels here for us so this has not moved. So we've been gone for about six hours and this shirt is dry. Like this is wearable. I think it's been yeah like has it been six hours? Five or six hours? Yeah pretty much six. This actually a little less than six hours. Yeah like this t-shirt is dry and we didn't come back to flip it or anything so like that's the beauty of merino wool. This stuff dries very very fast. No wrinkles in this thing. Good to go. And here we have the socks hanging. These guys are about 50% dry which I was expecting so they'll be dry by morning. Like I said socks take a little bit longer will be good in the morning. Shorts are about 80% dry so by morning they will be easily wearable. Okay now that we've shown you how we wash our clothes when we travel I have a few more tips that should help you if you want to do this as well. There is a bit of scheduling involved. Ideally you want to have at least two nights wherever you're staying if you're going to be doing laundry. That way you have a full night and a full day for things to dry. I find that socks usually take the longest to dry. I usually travel with cotton socks and so if you do need a pair to use for that day and your other socks are drying a hairdryer will work in a pinch. If you have to pack up and move to your next destination and some of your clothes aren't totally dry yet the beauty of the scrubba bag is that it does work as a dry bag so at the very least you can put your wet clothes or your damp clothes in the scrubba bag and transport them to your next destination and then when you check into your next hotel or accommodation you can then hang them up to dry or do a quick rewash and hang them up to dry. If you're planning to do laundry on your trip if you can try to research the types of bathrooms and sinks that your hotel is going to have. I usually do this by looking on the Google reviews or TripAdvisor reviews or the Booking.com or Expedia reviews and there will usually be photos of the bathroom so that you can kind of tell what kind of sink you'll be working with. If you're not sure or the sinks look pretty shallow that's when I would definitely pack the scrubba bag and sometimes we've been able to book rooms with double sinks which makes it ultra convenient for doing darks and lights at the same time. And if you weren't planning to do laundry but you need to do laundry in a pinch you can use the hotel shampoo. Shampoo is meant to remove body oils and it works really well especially in the shower. That's how I wash a lot of my bras because you bring them into the shower with you they're very easy to rinse and get wet use a bit of shampoo get it all sudsy and then it rinses super easy. So if you weren't planning to do laundry and you find yourself needing to wash a couple of quick things you can easily use shampoo. Okay humidity let's talk about humidity what about if you're traveling to climates that are very hot and humid and tropical those places are going to be usually like you know Mexico or Southeast Asia. I find that in those places you can usually find laundry services or laundromats that are very inexpensive to have some of your laundry done. We travel to Mexico quite often and you can drop off a kilogram of laundry for about like five dollars and it's done the next day for you. When I was in Bali about 10 years ago this is what I did every three or four days and I didn't even need to pack half of what I brought with me and it was only a backpack that I had. If you have a balcony ideally dry your clothes on the balcony in the sunshine there definitely are options out there and also I think or I at least hope this is becoming a new trend. When we were in Prague recently we came across a laundromat and wine bar so the whole idea was that you bring your clothes to wash them and while you're waiting you can order a glass of wine and enjoy it. There were snacks and everything it was a really cool setup so those are also always an option that you can essentially like build into your schedule. Now I know doing laundry isn't exactly what you dream about doing on vacation but once you do it once or twice I promise you it is shockingly easy and it takes no time at all. Being able to pack light is so much better than lugging around a massive suitcase. So I hope that you got some tips or tricks from this video. If you have any extra laundry tips on the road let me know down in the comments and we will see you in the next video. Thanks so much for watching!