When Condoleezza Rice or Vladimir Putin descend on the Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin, they sleep in sheets washed almost 100 miles away across the border in Poland.
The German capital's luxury hotels are looking for quality, but at a lower price.
Each day of the year apart from Christmas morning, white trucks registered in Poland to the German-owned company Fliegel Textilservice cross Berlin to collect sheets, tablecloths, towels and bathrobes from the city's top hotels.
Its trucks collect about 35 tonnes of laundry daily, most of it from four and five star hotels.
The trucks then head for Gryfino, a small town situated 150 kilometresmiles) from Berlin, close to the Polish port Szczecin.
The next day the laundry is returned pristine - washed, dried, ironed and folded.
The German investors built an industrial laundry next to a Polish thermal power plant in 1992, intending to profit from the nearby heat.
One key reason for setting up shop in Poland was the much lower salaries compared to Germany.
The factory operates 24 hours a day with the company's 380 mostly-female workforce earning an average three euros (3.9 dollars) gross per hour and 350 euros net (450 dollars) per month for those who work full time.
"I cannot even imagine how much it would cost me if I had to pay German wages," Franz-Josef Wiesemann, director of Fliegel TextilService, told AFP.
But salaries are not the only criteria for Wiesemann. Unlike the laundries in and around Berlin, he says the company is guaranteed to find a qualified and motivated workforce.
In this western region with an unemployment rate nudging 28 percent people are keen to hold on to their jobs.
"I have never had to place an advertisement for staff. There is word of mouth and we constantly have a waiting list for jobs," said Wiesemann.
"In Germany we would have problems with quality," he added. Across the border in Germany more and more tasks are mechanised to cut costs.
But the results achieved by machines often do not live up to the standards of the top hotels.
At Gryfino part of the linen is folded by hand according to clients' particular requirements.
"We fold towels according to how they will be laid out in the bedrooms," explained Wiesemann.
With such a service the company does not have to be the cheapest.
"We are not the least expensive in Berlin," admits Wiesemann.
With Poland's EU accession last May salaries will gradually creep upwards towards that of their richer neighbour, he acknowledged. But average Polish salaries are still around one-fifth of those in Germany.
"Poland will not abandon its significant competitive advantage on the European market and completely change its salaries so quickly," he said.
Poland's EU accession in May of last year has brought advantages for the business.
When the company launched it had to employ drivers to keep a place in border queues for its trucks or deploy a barge to cross the border via the Oder river where customs officers rarely intervened.
For hotels with limited stocks of laundry the company's guarantee to return their white goods within 24 hours is crucial.
"Before EU accession it was much more complicated. At the border there were very long waits. Of course everything now is easier," said Christine Woelke, the head of housekeeping for the Intercontinental in Berlin.
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