A Major Shift
In 2021, a survey of 13,000 US hospitality workers revealed that half of them wouldn’t return to their previous roles, with a third planning to leave the industry entirely for better opportunities.
Continued Struggles
By 2024, the global hospitality sector has significantly rebounded due to an increase in both leisure and business travel. However, the recovery remains incomplete, and many hotels continue to struggle with hiring and retaining staff. Despite increasing wages, offering more flexible hours, and expanding benefits, the industry still finds it challenging to address these issues.
Impact on Operations
A recent report from the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) highlights this problem, showing that 67% of surveyed US hotels are experiencing staffing shortages, with 12% describing their situation as “severely understaffed,” which affects their operational capabilities. The primary challenge for hoteliers remains meeting rising guest expectations and delivering high-quality customer experiences despite ongoing staffing shortages.
Innovation
To tackle this persistent issue, hotels are turning to technological innovation. Fides by LossLess Group offers a solution by helping hotels address labor challenges. This cloud-based SaaS ecosystem automates textile management processes, significantly reducing the need for human involvement. It also enhances the productivity of housekeeping staff, further improving overall operational efficiency.
Technology focus
The post-pandemic hotel industry has seen a significant acceleration in the adoption of technology. Health and safety concerns, enhanced guest expectations, labor shortages, and an overall drive for operational efficiency and differentiation are boosting this trend. Focus has been on guest-facing applications, such as mobile check-in, digital concierge services, and contactless payment systems.
Technology as a differentiator
One can understand the industry’s priority of providing superior guest experience as customer satisfaction and loyalty are crucial. Consequently, providers of new technology increasingly target this area of hotel operations, creating new systems on a nearly daily basis. In the highly competitive hotel market, standing still is losing an edge. Therefore, innovation, be it the roll out of new brands or implementing new technology, is essential for differentiation.
Willingness to invest
Given the innovation trend, hotels are allocating significant budgets to technological advancements. This investment is seen as necessary to drive profitable revenue growth. Some hotels have gone full out on technological development and are true high-tech travel destinations. Among these are Henn Na Hotel, Tokyo; Yotel, New York and Hotel Zetta, San Francisco. Whilst at the high end of innovation, as in the overall industry, their focus is guest-facing.
Front of house first
Technology investment in guest-facing areas is a no-brainer as this has a direct and visible impact on guest experience. Also, these investments are easier to justify as they often have a clearer, more immediate ROI. Front-of-house innovations tend to streamline operations in a way that guests directly notice and appreciate. Importantly, in many cases they free up staff for other tasks. This is especially important in an industry that experiences serious staff recruitment and turnover challenges.
So, what about back of house
Shortage of labour seriously impacts essential operations like housekeeping. As a result, this issue exacerbates the significant challenge of efficient textile management that hotels often struggle with on a daily basis. Dealing with textiles is a manual, error-prone and labour-intensive activity that affects all areas of hotel operations. Lack of automation impacts operational and financial efficiency. Fides, the cloud-based SaaS eco-system by LossLess Group, is an essential textile management solution. It gives hotels full control of all aspects of their textile operations, on-site and at the laundry.
A massive industry
At LossLess Group , we consider it one of our primary responsibilities to help flatten the curve of environmental mismanagement. We operate in interconnected industries that have a common denominator: Textiles, a nearly two trillion dollar annual market. Fides contributes to ‘Green’ initiatives by providing circularity of products by re-use of assets, and lowering textile investment through predictive and timely order processes, and decreasing PAR usage numbers.
Cotton production
According to the WWF, the production of inorganic cotton is a relevant factor for the destruction of freshwater ecosystems. Each year, cotton producers use as much as 25% of the world’s insecticides and more than 10% of the world’s pesticides. By using our system, customers can better predict future textile requirements. This establishes a more efficient just-in-time pickup and delivery process with their laundries, and prevents overstocking because customers often lack reliable information on stock levels and delivery times.
Know your stock
Making textiles traceable improves visibility on stock flow and location. This is especially important in large properties with multiple storage facilities on which housekeeping has difficulty establishing at any given time the availability of inventory. The ability to use the full complement of articles on site means that staff does not have to call upon the laundry for extra textiles. As a result, fewer washes are needed, meaning lower usage of detergents, water, gas and electricity, and lower carbon emissions.
Circularity
Failure to manage textiles when taken out of circulation has serious environmental consequences. Most textiles end up as waste, and are an increasing component of landfills, estimated to exceed 100 billion pounds globally, one third in the United States alone. These materials can take up to 50 years to decompose. It is estimated some 95% of all textiles have the potential to be recycled, but only 15% are. Fides provides data to attribute a residual value to textiles, making them fit for trading in a secondary market and re-use.
Social responsibility
We believe companies will implement our system not only to manage the lifecycle of their textiles, but also to contribute to social responsibility initiatives. Lower consumption of textiles, and more efficient wash and distribution models improve carbon footprint and reduce the use of natural resources.
Acronym
RFID is an acronym for Radio Frequency Identification. It is a wireless communication technology that uses radio waves to identify and track objects. Over the last 20 years, it has been commercialized, and is used in areas as diverse as supply chain and tracking cows in a field. At LossLess Group, we uniquely apply RIFD technology as a supporting element in Fides. This is our cloud-based SaaS ecosystem that gives hotels full control of their textiles.
Automatic
RFID belongs to a group of technologies referred to as Automatic Identification and Data Capture. AIDC methods automatically identify objects, collect their data, and transmit that information directly into computer systems. This tracking process takes place with little or no human intervention. Fides operates in an environment that uses UHF RFID. This is an ultra-high frequency form that has higher read rates and a longer read range.
Ultra High Frequency
UHF RFID offers a read range that allows us to track both individual items and bulk shipments. Fides uses this capability to offer a solution to the challenge of hotels to efficiently manage their textiles. Unfortunately, many hotels still lack adequate control of expensive bed sheets, pillowcases and towels. This is all the more surprising as the investment in linen and laundry represents the second or third largest Profit & Loss expense.
Everyday Use
In their daily lives, many people already work with a technology that is based on RFID protocols. As an example, shoppers pay for groceries by holding a credit card or mobile phone close to a chip card reader. When doing so, the devices communicate through NFC, Near Field Communication. The difference between RFID and NFC is the distance over which communication takes place. It’s the reason you have to hold your phones so close together when you’re sharing photos with a friend of that great vacation in Florida.
A definition
There are numerous explanations for the Internet of Things (IoT), often accompanied by detailed infographics that illustrate its functions and advantages. To put it simply, the IoT is a network of interconnected computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals, or people, all equipped with unique identifiers (UIDs). These devices can transfer data over a network without the need for human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
Mismatched communication
While this definition may seem complex, the key takeaway is the elimination of human involvement in data transfer. Human interactions can sometimes negatively impact communication processes, whereas machines exchange information without personal biases and with far fewer errors. It’s quite remarkable that it took so long for our technology-driven society to embrace such a revolutionary idea.
Pioneer
A fascinating example of early IoT innovation is the story of a Coca-Cola vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. This machine was modified to automatically report its inventory and whether newly loaded drinks were cold, making it the first Internet-connected appliance. However, the term “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble in 1999. Ashton was working on supply chain optimization and sought to integrate RFID technology into the process.
Perfect communication
At LossLess Group, we harness the power of IoT by attaching RFID tags to textiles, enabling them to communicate with other RFID-enabled items. We’ve learned the importance of not interfering with this process, which is likely why our system has been so successful.