The PAR reality
Ask how many textiles a hotel needs and sooner or later somebody will mention PAR. Three PAR. Four PAR. Sometimes five. 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 number of textiles required to operate safely. It is a useful rule of thumb. But that is exactly what it is: a rule of thumb. Consider two identical 300-room hotels.
The first has an average occupancy of 70%, guests typically stay several nights and its laundry consistently returns clean textiles 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? And the same question applies whether the hotel owns its textiles or rents them.
Ownership and rental
In an hotel-owned-textile 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 textiles have 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. Perhaps the more interesting problem with PAR is that it tends to treat textile requirements as static when hotel operations are anything but.
Dynamic requirements
Occupancy changes. Seasonality changes. Laundry turnaround changes. Guest behaviour changes. 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
There is also a danger that PAR becomes the answer to problems it did not cause. If textiles repeatedly run short, increasing PAR is an obvious solution. And sometimes it is the correct one. But perhaps the hotel already has enough textiles and too many of them are sitting in the wrong place. Perhaps laundry turnaround has deteriorated. Perhaps losses have increased. Perhaps housekeeping pantries are accumulating unnecessary buffers.
Adding another half PAR will probably make the shortage disappear. It may also make the underlying problem disappear from view. The objective should therefore not be to operate with the lowest possible PAR. Hotels need resilience. Laundry trucks arrive late, occupancy exceeds forecasts and real operations rarely behave exactly as planned. The objective is to understand how many textiles this particular operation actually requires.
From assumption to evidence
Today we can increasingly measure the variables that determine that number: occupancy, consumption, circulation time, loss, available stock and laundry turnaround. Once we do, PAR no longer needs to be an assumption imposed on the operation. It can become something the operation itself tells us. One hotel may discover that 3.2 PAR provides a perfectly comfortable buffer for a particular article. Another may genuinely need 4.5. 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 many PAR should we have?” It is: “How many textiles do we actually need, and why?” That is the difference between applying a rule and managing an operation.