A hotel knows exactly how many rooms it sold yesterday. Does it know how many textiles it needs

The measurement gap

Hotels have become extraordinarily good at measuring things. A General Manager can know yesterday’s occupancy, ADR and RevPAR almost instantly. Revenue management systems forecast demand weeks ahead. Labour productivity, energy consumption, food costs and guest satisfaction are measured continuously, compared with targets and used to make decisions. Now ask a deceptively simple question: How many textiles does the hotel actually need? The answer is often much less precise.

There will be an agreed PAR level. Procurement will know what has been purchased, or the laundry will know how much rental stock has been allocated to the property. Housekeeping knows from experience roughly what is required to get through a busy day. Periodic inventories may provide another reference point. But none of these necessarily answers the question. And importantly, whether the hotel owns or rents its textiles makes surprisingly little difference.

Availability beyond the inventory

What the hotel really needs to understand is whether enough textiles are available to support its operation efficiently. Some is in guestrooms. Some is in housekeeping pantries. Some is waiting for collection. Some is being washed. Some is travelling back from the laundry. Some is damaged, some has disappeared from circulation and some may simply be sitting somewhere it is not currently needed. A hotel can therefore have plenty of textiles and still experience shortages.

It can also have far more textiles than it really needs and never experience a shortage at all. The second situation is much harder to notice. If textiles are hotel-owned, excessive inventory means unnecessary capital sitting in cupboards, storerooms and laundry circulation. If it is rented, the cost is less visible but still very real. The hotel ultimately pays for the stock dedicated to servicing its operation, including the excess stock required to compensate for inefficient circulation.

Questions that guide decisions

This is what makes the question “How many pieces do we have?” useful, but insufficient. The more interesting questions are: How much do we actually consume? How quickly do textiles return from the laundry? How much buffer do we need? Which articles are disappearing faster than expected? How does occupancy affect requirements? And, perhaps most importantly, how much stock is necessary to maintain availability without paying for inventory the operation does not really need?

From counts to control

Historically, answering those questions accurately was difficult. Textiles move constantly, in enormous quantities, between multiple locations. Measuring that movement manually requires considerable effort, which is why hotels quite reasonably developed PAR levels, periodic stocktakes and experienced-based rules to manage it. But hospitality has gone through exactly the same transition in many other areas. Revenue management moved from historical averages and intuition towards live information and forecasting. Energy management became increasingly measurable. Food purchasing became connected to consumption. Labour planning became connected to occupancy. In each case, better information didn’t replace the experience of hotel professionals. It made that experience more useful. Textiles are beginning to follow the same path.

The objective is not to know, with obsessive precision, that the hotel has 4,837 bath towels at 10:32 on Tuesday morning. The objective is to know whether it has the right amount of bath towels to meet demand efficiently, today and in the weeks ahead. That is a very different question. And for an industry that can forecast how many rooms it expects to sell next Tuesday, perhaps knowing how many textiles those rooms will require should not be such a radical idea.