What lies beneath the bed sheets?

Production and site managers working at our seven UK sites, which supply linen to clients around the country, noted items found within bed linen returned for cleaning over the course of a year and uncovered some bizarre finds.

Remote controls are the most common items that hotel guests lose among the bed sheets. With nearly 2000 found per year, if laid lengthways that’s enough to reach 40 metres beyond the world’s tallest hotel, the JW Marriott Marquis in Dubai, which stands at 355 metres.

Children's cuddly toys or comforters were the second most likely item to be found in sheets returned to us for cleaning with items of clothing, keys and bank cards following closely behind.

And despite claims that many are addicted to our smartphones and tablets, plenty of hotel guests manage to be parted from them long enough to lose them within the bed sheets. At our Cheltenham site as many as five missing mobile phones and tablets are found every month.

Other items found during the year included a set of dentures and a finger puppet.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of items recovered from dirty sheets increases during the summer months when our hotel clients are at their busiest while there are also peaks of more intimate play things around Valentine's Day and Christmas.

All objects found by our staff are recorded and attempts are made to return them to their rightful owners.

In many cases our laundry staff managed to track down owners through the hotels we work with, but when it came to reuniting the police with their laptop, our Ross-on-Wye team let the professionals do the hard work. Police officers had already located the laptop through its tracking device and arrived at the site just as it was recovered.

Parents whose children were reunited with lost comforters and toys were the most grateful, sending thank you notes and even boxes of chocolates to our laundry staff who had gone the extra mile to return the much-loved items to their little ones.

CLEAN's Chief Executive of said: “Our laundries deliver five million linen items to our customers each week, so with so many of our sheets covering beds at hotels across the country, its unsurprising that we get the odd foreign object or two when they are returned for laundering. What was surprising was the nature and expense of some of the items. Fortunately for hotels and guests, our efficient systems allow us to easily track where the items have come from so they can be reunited with their owners.”

Most commonly-found objects recovered from hotel bedsheets:

• Remote controls
  
• Child's cuddly toy or comforter
  
• Clothes
  
• Bank cards
  
• Keys
  
• Food
  

The strangest objects recovered from hotel bedsheets:

• Oil radiator
  
• Side of salmon
  
• Police chief's laptop computer
  
• Dentures
  
• Finger puppet