Laundry management is a cornerstone of the hospitality industry. Guaranteeing the cleanliness, freshness, quality and accessibility of bed linens and towels is a fundamental element for guest satisfaction and plays a vital role in upholding the hotel’s positive image.

Data from STR, which provides premium data benchmarking, analytics and market insights for the global hospitality industry, indicates that hotel occupancy rates surpassed 65 per cent in 2022 and there is a rising trend in the average earnings generated per room as the hospitality sector bounces back from the impact of the pandemic.

In cases where hotels experience a shortage of laundered linens and are unable to prepare rooms promptly, they are constrained from accommodating new guests. Given that rooms contribute to approximately 65 per cent of a hotel’s total revenue, effective and efficient laundry management emerges as an indispensable component for maintaining profitability.

Challenges with traditional manual approaches

As the hospitality industry becomes increasingly competitive, hotels face notable challenges in managing linens flow and ensuring enough inventories to go around. These include inaccuracy in linens assortment planning and allocation, increase in linen procurement and associated expenses, deterioration in the quality of housekeeping services, foregone room revenues and diminished levels of customer satisfaction.

Hotels experience a loss of 20 to 30 per cent of their linens averagely, resulting in costs exceeding approximately US$50,000 annually. The loss is attributed to factors such as gradual deterioration from regular use, theft and deficiencies in control systems during linen transportation to and from laundry facilities.

Linen management is a time-intensive and labour-demanding responsibility that necessitates repetitive manual counting, which can lead to errors and inaccuracies.

The housekeeping department must conduct frequent assessments of linen inventory, involving physical counts across all locations within the operational cycle, including linen storage areas, laundry facilities, floor pantries, room attendant carts and guestrooms. This comprehensive procedure must be accomplished within a single day and repeated as frequently as possible, given the continuous utilization of linens.

Transforming linen management with RFID and cloud-based innovations

The adoption of RFID technology and cloud-based software innovations have ushered in a new era on how laundry and linen inventory management is performed and optimised.

The implementation of an advanced system for tracking linens presents game-changing possibilities, empowering hotels to realise financial benefits, optimise inventory control, improve overall guest satisfaction as well as promote environmentally friendly practices.

This can be undertaken by embedding every piece of linen with a discreet RFID tag resembling a care label. The tag, which holds an exclusive identification code, is scanned during each phase of the laundry journey, producing an array of valuable insights for both the housekeeping staff and the commercial laundry service. This seamless approach streamlines linen management effectively and enhances the overall customer experience.

The housekeeping department must conduct frequent assessments of linen inventory, involving physical counts across all locations within the operational cycle, including linen storage areas, laundry facilities, floor pantries, room attendant carts and guestrooms.

The embedded RFID technology also offers time-saving advantage, rendering linen counting and inventory management more efficient and precise. Hundreds of linen tags can be scanned in bulk within seconds, whether they are on the shelves or in laundry carts, instead of manually counting them one by one by hand.

The tracking functionality of RFID tags also provides textile services professionals with the capability to not only monitor the movement of linen throughout the laundry process and ensure its prompt return to shelves, but also to monitor the wash count for assessing linen durability.

(Above pic: HID’s innovative linen tracking solution)

Examination of tag-generated data empowers hotels to identify when a linen item no longer meets quality criteria (such as exceeding 50 wash cycles), enabling an automated and targeted restocking process. The cloud-based software overseeing tag data grants linen experts’ real-time awareness of the precise whereabouts, state and accessibility of their textile inventory, whether on-site or at the laundry facility.

RFID technology stands as a transformative answer to the challenges faced in linen management within the hospitality sector. By addressing planning errors, curbing unnecessary linen acquisitions and associated expenses, elevating housekeeping standards, preventing missed room revenues and amplifying client contentment, RFID enables hotels to attain unparalleled operational effectiveness and economic gains in the competitive hospitality industry.

The author of this article is Fabrice Morini , the Vice President leading HID’s Textile Services business unit worldwide.