Loss has different causes
Hotels often talk about “textile loss” as though it were a single problem. At the beginning of the year there were 10,000 towels. During the year another 2,000 were added. At the next inventory there are fewer than expected. The difference is loss. Mathematically, that may be correct. Operationally, it tells us remarkably little.
A towel can disappear from available stock in many different ways. A guest may take it. It may be damaged and discarded. It may remain forgotten in a housekeeping pantry. It may be sent to the laundry and never return. It may have been transferred somewhere else in the property. In an RFID environment, the towel may still exist while its chip has stopped responding.
All of these situations produce approximately the same result on a traditional inventory: one less towel. But they are completely different management problems. And if we cannot distinguish between them, the only practical response is usually to replace what is missing.
Follow the evidence
This is particularly important because the word loss can very quickly become a discussion about responsibility. The hotel thinks the laundry is losing textiles. The laundry believes the hotel is losing it. Housekeeping suspects guests. Procurement simply sees replacement orders increasing. Everybody may be partly right. The more useful question is not therefore how many textiles are we losing? but where, when and why are textiles leaving effective circulation? That distinction matters.
If an unusual number of articles leave the hotel for the laundry but do not return, there is something specific to investigate. If textiles enter a housekeeping pantry and remain there for weeks, that is not really loss at all; it is dormant inventory. If an article repeatedly appears in circulation and then suddenly stops being detected, it may be lost, damaged or simply have a failed RFID chip. And if particular towel types disappear much faster than sheets, guest behaviour may indeed be part of the explanation. Each diagnosis suggests a different action. This applies equally to owned and rental textiles.
Ownership changes the cost mechanism
With hotel-owned textiles, losses translate visibly into replacement purchases. With rental textiles, the mechanism may be different, loss charges, contractual allowances, replacement provisions or ultimately the economics of the rental price, but the hotel still pays for the consequences. And again, the incentives are worth understanding. A laundry naturally has an incentive to operate its plant efficiently. But unless the commercial arrangement specifically rewards reducing the hotel’s textile losses, the hotel is usually the party with the strongest financial incentive to understand why its textile requirement keeps increasing.
Turn diagnosis into action
That is why control should remain with the hotel even when ownership does not. This does not need to turn the hotel-laundry relationship into a search for blame. Quite the opposite. Good information can replace blame with evidence. Perhaps the most useful outcome of better textile visibility is not being able to say: “We lost 427 towels last quarter.”
It is being able to say: “Of the towels that disappeared from normal circulation, this proportion was damaged, this proportion became lost inside the hotel, and this proportion stopped appearing after leaving for laundry.” Hotels are complicated environments, textiles move constantly and losses will always occur. But there is a considerable difference between accepting that some textiles will disappear and accepting that we do not know why. Because “textile loss” is not really a diagnosis. It is what we call the problem when we haven’t yet found one.