Guest laundries in accommodation facilities have been around since the beginning of travel, but are you making sure yours is up to date?
Previously, a washing machine and dryer set up for coin – usually at $4 per wash and dry was standard for most guest laundries throughout Australia.
Collecting, counting, and banking coins was all a part of offering this ‘service’ to your guests.
However, with less people carrying coins, instead relying on card or tap’n’go payments - it is important to make sure your laundry takes the payment type your guests have in their pockets.
Cashless or card payment options are the solution to upgrade your guest laundry, and it’s easier than you might think.
Why upgrade to cashless / card payment laundry equipment?
- Never worry about changing, counting, and banking coins again.
- Remove the threat of vandalism and break-ins.
- Make paying easier for your guests and increase the amount they spend.
- Ensures every dollar goes into your bank account.
Most brands of commercial washers and dryers can either be purchased outright with card readers pre-bolted on, or if you have older equipment on site retrofit kits are also easily available.
While the retrofitting of card readers to old equipment on site can very from model to model, if you have washers or dryers with a “Coin Drop” or that has a digital display, you can rest assured that they will be fairly easy to retrofit from coin to card.
There are a number of cashless or card payment options available for your laundry room which fall into 3 categories.
QR CODES or APP’s
Societies response to Covid brought with it a huge resurgent of QR codes.
Like scanning a QR code at a restaurant, this system will have a QR code stuck onto the machine, which your guest scan to take them to a website to either use their phone pay or enter there card details online to process the transaction.
The downfall to this set up is that it is not intuitive for the customer and the customer journey to payment can be difficult. QR codes are also easily spoofed and scammed.
CENTAL PAY KIOSKS.
Central Pay Kiosks are often mounted in the room of the laundry, and these kiosks are where the users make their payment, before going and selecting the wash or dry required from the machine itself.
End customers often find these kiosks confusing, having to run back and forwards from the machine they’ve loaded with their clothes to the central kiosk.
If your central pay kiosk goes down, having all machines tied back to this one kiosk means all machines in the laundry are rendered unusable.
CARD READER DIRECT TO MACHINE.
Card readers directly mounted to each washer or dryer is the most common and user-friendly option to upgrade your guest laundry equipment.
Similar to a parking meter or your supermarkets self-serve check out, this individual card reader to each machines ensure your users can easily load the machine and swipe, insert or tap their payment, all on the machine itself for simplicity.
There are no additional scanning of QR codes or apps to download or manually entering of payment details etc – just a quick tap’n’go!
With these direct to machine card readers usually installed with their own Data Sim, each card reader is completely separate to each other, so if one fails, the rest of the laundry equipment will keep operating as per normal.
Costs:
Upgrading to card reader machines does have some costs involved.
Firstly, a new machine with a card reader installed or a retrofit kit must be purchased.
After that, you have 2 on-going costs.
The first cost is a monthly hosting fee, to keep your card reader online and connected to the bank processing system.
The second cost is a payment processing fee - the company that processes the payment into your account will take a set percentage of each transaction to facilitate this.
These fees will vary from supplier to supplier, make sure you find out upfront the exact ongoing fees you will be paying.
At Dependable Laundry Solutions we have partnered with one of Australia’s largest payment processing companies to ensure you are getting the best ongoing costs backed up by industry leading support.
The Dependable Laundry Solutions team can be reached on 1800 MAYTAG (1800 629 824) to learn more about upgrading your guest laundry to cashless.
