Outsourced ownership, retained responsibility
Across much of Europe, hotels no longer own their textiles. They rent them from their laundry provider. It is an attractive model. The hotel avoids purchasing and replacing large textile inventories, while the laundry takes responsibility for supplying, washing and maintaining them. And it leads to an apparently reasonable conclusion: if the hotel doesn’t own the textiles, why should it bother managing them? Because the hotel may have outsourced the ownership of the textile, but it has not outsourced the consequences of not having it available.
A room still needs clean sheets before it can be sold. Housekeeping still needs towels on the floor when rooms are being serviced. A shortage still creates emergency calls, additional movements, delays and frustration. Ultimately, it is the hotel, not the owner of the textiles, that needs the right articles, in the right quantities, at the right moment. There is an economic dimension too.
The hotel still pays for the system
Suppose a 300-room hotel can operate comfortably with 10,000 towels circulating efficiently between the property and its laundry. If inefficient circulation means that 12,000 are required to provide exactly the same service, the fact that the additional 2,000 belong to somebody else does not make their cost disappear.
Someone has purchased them. They occupy space. They are transported, handled and washed. They require financing and eventually replacement. Sooner or later, those costs form part of the economics of the laundry service. This does not mean that laundries deliberately operate inefficiently. Far from it. A good laundry has every reason to run an efficient industrial operation. But the objectives of the two businesses are not identical. The laundry needs to process textiles efficiently. The hotel needs to ensure availability efficiently. That distinction matters.
Control without interference
It also means that controlling rental textiles should not be confused with controlling the laundry. The objective is not surveillance, nor trying to determine who is responsible every time a towel disappears. Better information should actually make the relationship easier: what left the hotel, what returned, how long the process took, whether circulating stock is sufficient, where shortages are developing and whether both parties are operating within the service levels they agreed.
Availability is a management decision
The alternative is to manage availability through buffers. If nobody really knows how efficiently textiles are circulating, the safest solution is simply to have more of them in the system. That works. But safety stock has a cost, irrespective of who technically owns it. Hotels routinely outsource important parts of their operations. Outsourcing, however, does not normally mean giving up measurement. A hotel using an external housekeeping company still measures room readiness and cleaning quality. A hotel doesn’t stop monitoring energy consumption because the electricity comes from somebody else’s power station. Textiles should be no different.
Whether textiles are owned, rented or managed under some hybrid arrangement is a commercial decision. Whether the hotel understands how effectively those textiles support its operation is a management decision. The two should not be confused. You can outsource textiles. You cannot outsource textile availability.