9/27 Webinar Shares U.K., U.S. Success Renting Linen to Hotels
Most U.S. outsourced laundries profit more from hotels by servicing their customer-owned goods (COG) than renting linen to them. A Sept. 27 TRSA webinar will explain how the reverse can be true. Participants will hear from experienced U.K. hotel laundry specialists whose customers have preferred rental for decades and a U.S. operator who has 90% of its hotel volume in rental.
Sharing experience from England will be David Stevens, who leads the Textile Services Association (TSA), based in Bracknell (Berkshire, London). Stevens and his brother, Robert’s, family business, NewGen Business Services (Gloucester), is an international laundry consultancy with roots in the U.K.’s Paragon Laundry chain, which dates to 1918. Joining him in this webinar will be Andrew Glassford, NewGen operations director, who was a Paragon GM before moving up to operations support director there.
Mike Benik, owner/operator of People’s Linen, Keene, NH, for 39 years, will explain how his company has demonstrated to customers that rental is a better value than owning and maintaining their own linen inventory. People’s has demonstrated to U.S. hotels they ultimately benefit from the company’s:
- Economizing by minimizing stock-keeping units (SKUs)
- Facilitation of sharing inventory between accounts
- Working with customers to control their linen consumption
Rental’s greater efficiency can be promoted as better for hotels than the benefits of selecting their linen’s brand and operating their own laundries. Benik says that when both hoteliers and linen services back off their traditional stances, even if just a bit at first, rental can prevail because both parties are better served.
People’s has offered “hybrid” programs, in which the company buys the branded linen a hotel wants and rents it to this customer. Or the company might just buy one item while renting all others from a standard rental product line. A customer may like a particular a top sheet, for example, so People’s will buy it and charge a premium for its rental.
Either party may retreat completely from its industry’s traditional stance. A hotel in a chain operation whose properties typically adhere to its linen-brand standard can break ranks, choosing to benefit from rental’s lower cost. Or People’s may be attracted to a COG deal with a larger resort (at least 150 to 200 rooms) because it represents enough revenue to the laundry initially with potential to convert the business to rental.
In the latter case, the service agreement can provide for substitution of rental linen when a COG shortfall is expected. When this occurs often enough, customers can become accustomed to rental linen and shift to all rental. They realize they don’t have to manage the linen purchase anymore and switch.
Register here for this webinar with a TRSA logon; if you don’t have one, go to the MyTRSA tab atop www.trsa.org. TRSA webinars are free for staff of member companies and $45 for nonmembers.