Linencraft lights the way

Originally part of Emirates Flight Catering and still affiliated to Emirates airline, Linencraft has expanded from a four-ton laundry service at Dubai International Airport to an 80 ton facility - at Dubai Investments Park - which has been operational for eight months.

"We've been in the laundry business now for the last 35 years at the international airport, so we'd outgrown that site, and we saw the opportunity in the market to grow beyond strictly airline laundering and dry cleaning services towards the hospitality market," explains the firm's senior vice president Jan Bijsterbosch.

Although many hotels still have in-house laundry and dry cleaning capabilities, as more and more land is covered by the increasing number of new hotel projects in Dubai, demand is growing for external laundry services.

"Real estate is getting more expensive and the hospitality sector wants to have as much revenue-generating space in a hotel as they can, and clearly laundry is not a revenue-generating space, so they are trying to outsource to companies like ourselves. It's going to get massive; absolutely massive," says Bijsterbosch.

Linencraft processes more than 148,000 pieces of linen and garments per day, both from the airline and hospitality sectors, and the company is spending AED 7 million (US $1,900,000) on a new 35 ton dedicated hospitality laundry line and automatic finishing equipment - but competition is emerging.

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"There's definitely a lot of competition in the market, because a lot of companies are jumping on the bandwagon to capitalise on the growing hospitality market in Dubai. So we are certainly not alone," admits Bijsterbosch. "But I think we've got an operation that is superior to what is currently in Dubai. I know that there are some companies under construction that are probably trying to match what we do now, but we've got a very high standard and our quality levels are currently unsurpassed here."

Despite his belief in their superiority, Bijsterbosch does admit that Linencraft will not be able to deal with all the demand, as the company is well on its way to full capacity, but he says: "I think we got in at the right time and I think that Victor Bastien, our laundry manager, has a very good name and he knows most of the executive housekeepers and laundry managers at the hotels, which means our message of quality before price is hitting the market."

Victor Bastian worked in the hotel industry in India for 16 years before joining Emirates Flight Catering, and he believes that it is quality, not quantity that will place the company ahead of the competition.

"Because the volume is in place we would never take on any business that goes over the capacity that we have on site. [When you try and process more than your capacity] that's when your quality begins to drop and you are unable to deliver on time," he says. "The entire team that we have here are ex-hoteliers themselves so they have the experience. Because of the experience we have in this field from the industry, [our staff] has the know-how for that high quality that the hotels demand."

As well as the experienced staff, Linencraft has the largest laundry facility in the Middle East, and its own fully equipped training room.

"None of the laundries in this part of the world have that, or a training department. We have our own dedicated team who handle it all," explains Bastian, adding that Linencraft is unique because of the equipment it uses.

"We have invested substantially more than our competitors in [the Middle East]. This equipment has proven its reliability all over the world. And going a step further, we have a dedicated team here as well," explains Bastian.

The equipment also has a modem interface, which connects it to the German manufacturer and allows the company to identify and rectify any problems.

"In addition to that we have an engineer from the company itself who has been on site for the past year now. He will be here for another six months to train our team and once he's convinced that the team is capable of troubleshooting any problem he will leave," says Bastian.

And the whole process is recorded using a high-tech computer system that logs every item.

"This means that hotels can come and check our computer system at any time. On a daily basis we retrieve all the data onto a hard disk," Bastian explains.

"The hotel could therefore know what a particular guest has given on a particular day."