Rental Textiles – A Win-Win for Hotels, Laundries

U.S. hoteliers and laundry operators can learn valuable lessons from their British cousins on converting customer-owned goods (COG) laundry services to rental plans. That was the message that two United Kingdom (UK) consultants brought to a Sept. 27 TRSA webinar titled “Why UK Rental Linen Leads and How the U.S. Can Follow.”

Panelists included a U.S. independent operator, Mike Benik, chief financial officer of People’s Linen Service, Keene, NH. His company has pioneered such conversions and rented to first-time hotel and resort laundry outsourcers in New England states such as Vermont and New Hampshire.

Benik told the online attendees that hoteliers in his region, including ski resorts and other leisure destinations, are amenable to rental because they make the process simpler for staff. “We can make their lives better with rental,” Benik said. “They’re willing to buy in.” Rental helps eliminate the “blame game” among managers and housekeeping staff if the hotel has shortages of COG linens that leave guests stranded in the lobby waiting for rooms.

A second panelist, David Stevens, plays a dual role in the UK linen, uniform and facility services market. The former managing director of Paragon, once among the largest independent laundries in the UK, Stevens today serves as CEO of the Textile Services Association (TSA; TRSA’s counterpart association ). He also is the director/founder of NewGen Business Services, a laundry/hospitality consulting firm serving the UK and the Middle East. Stevens noted that British hotels have embraced laundry outsourcing. Currently, nearly 96% of the linens processed for UK hotels are handled by laundry contractors. Of this outsourced market, 95% opt for a rental solution, he said. UK hotel customers like not having to worry about whether there’s enough linen to make up their rooms. “Owning the product gives you much more control on delivering a fantastic service to the end user,” said Stevens, who participated in the webinar with NewGen colleague Andrew Glassford.

While NewGen has 60 product lines in their pool stock proposition, the more that outsource companies can standardize their linen offerings and reduce stockkeeping units (SKUs), the easier life becomes for both the laundry and their hotel partners, Glassford said. This move also translates to more effective production in the laundry as well, with fewer partial loads.

Benik noted that mid-production changeovers for COG work pose a major headache ins People’s’ newer plant, where “changes are killing us” in lost productivity and extra labor. That reinforced the idea of transitioning more customers to rental textiles.

To encourage a shift to rental, Benik’s team developed a “hybrid” program. He told customers, including those from several major hotel chains, that People’s wouldn’t operate on Sundays. Should the hotels run short on linens, People’s would supplement their stock with comparable rental textiles. In time, several of these companies have shifted to rental, he said.

Stevens added that while dealing with branded hotel linens poses a challenge, guests seldom notice if a rental duvet is a fraction different in specification to the hotel-specified brand. Laundry operators can make the move to rental succeed by emphasizing how the quality and service that they provide saves hotels time and money. The other issue is that linens are a small fraction of the overall cost of running the hotel. If laundries stick to this rationale, they can create a win-win scenario by converting hotels to rental textiles, Stevens said.

The biggest downside of outsourcing for UK laundries is that linen-loss rates are high – as much as 60% annually or more than 12.5 million pieces. Stevens said an appeal to the environmental impact of having to replace linens is helping UK launderers heighten awareness of the need to reduce “shrinkage.”

Click here to access the webinar recording. TRSA’s On-Demand Learning Center offers more than 100 industry-specific webinar recordings and other programs that provide professional development and training on a range of issues, including regulatory/compliance matters, safety, best practices and strategies for enhancing productivity. See TRSA’s Calendar of Events for upcoming webinars and in-person and virtual events.