LossLess Group
The PAR reality
Ask how much linen a hotel needs and sooner or later somebody will mention PAR. Four PAR, five PAR. The number varies, but the underlying idea is remarkably persistent: take the theoretical requirement to service the hotel once, multiply it by an agreed number, and you have approximately the amount of linen required to operate safely.
It is a useful rule of thumb but nothing more. Consider two identical 300-room hotels. The first has average occupancy of 70%, guests typically stay several nights and its laundry consistently returns clean linen within 24 hours. The second operates at 90%, has a high proportion of short stays and its laundry cycle frequently takes 48 hours. Why would both hotels need the same PAR?
Ownership vs. rental
The same question applies whether the hotel owns its textiles or rents them. In an owned-linen model, excessive PAR means capital tied up in unnecessary inventory. In a rental model, the financial mechanism is different, but the underlying inefficiency remains.
If more linen has to be purchased, financed, stored, transported and processed to maintain the same level of availability, that cost does not disappear simply because the textiles sit on somebody else’s balance sheet.
Dynamic requirements
Perhaps the more interesting problem with PAR is that it tends to treat linen requirements as static when hotel operations are anything but: variable occupancy, seasonality changes, laundry turnaround inefficiency, guest behaviour. Textile losses fluctuate, some articles are changed every day while others are used much less frequently.
A bath towel and a duvet cover do not necessarily require the same circulating buffer simply because they happen to belong to the same room. Yet it is common to apply one PAR philosophy across an entire textile inventory.
Problem or solution
The danger is that PAR becomes the answer to problems it does not cause. If linen repeatedly runs short, increasing PAR is an obvious solution, and sometimes the correct one. However, the hotel may have enough linen on site but it sits in the wrong place. Perhaps laundry turnaround has deteriorated, losses have increased or housekeeping pantries are accumulating unnecessary buffers.
Adding another half PAR may make the shortage disappear. It may also make the underlying problem disappear from view. The objective should not be to operate with the lowest possible PAR. Laundry trucks arrive late, occupancy exceeds forecasts and operations rarely behave exactly as planned. Hotels need resilience and the objective is to understand how much linen an operation actually needs.
From assumption to evidence
Today we can increasingly measure the variables that determine the correct PAR: occupancy, consumption, circulation time, losses, available stock and laundry turnaround. When doing so, PAR no longer needs to be an assumption imposed on the operation. It becomes a reality the operation itself tells us.
One hotel may discover that 3.2 PAR provides a perfectly comfortable buffer for a particular article. Another hotel may genuinely need 4.5 PAR to operate efficiently. Even within the same hotel, the appropriate level may differ by textile type or change during different periods of the year.
Conclusion
Four PAR was never a bad idea. It provided a simple answer to a complicated question when much of the information required to answer it properly was unavailable. But today the more useful question is no longer: “How much PAR should we have?” It is: “How much linen do we actually need, and why?”
It’s the difference between applying a rule and managing an operation.
