Still Counting by Hand? Why Hotel Linen Management Is Stuck in the Past — and What to Do About It

If you asked most hotel operators how many linens they actually own right now, most couldn't give you a confident answer. They could let you know the counts from last month or what was ordered last quarter, but that still doesn’t answer what is physically in service today. This is not because they aren't good at their jobs, but because the industry has never given them the tools to know.

That's not a criticism. It's the reality of an industry that has been running on the same operational assumptions for decades, and it's costing hotels more than they realize.

Your Linens Are Out There. Somewhere.

According to Hotel Online, “shrinkage rates of 15-20% annually are not uncommon.” This results in operational inefficiencies, as well as increased linen and labor costs.

The response from most of the industry? "That's just how it works."

And that's true. It has been how it works. But "how it works" and "how it should work" are two very different things. When you can't track an individual item, you can't understand where loss is happening, what's wearing out prematurely, or how to plan for replacements. You're operating blind.

Counting Linens With a Clipboard. In 2026.

On the hotel side, inventory is typically tracked through manual counts on a piece of paper over the course of a few days. A housekeeping supervisor and their team walk the entire property, count each individual item, and record what's there. The property will coordinate with the laundry to perform a manual count of all items, which goes against their typical tracking practice - using a scale to log the inventory poundage.

Think about that for a moment. An industry that contains multi-million-dollar hospitality properties is managing one of its biggest variable costs using a scale and a clipboard.

The result is that no one - not the hotel, not the laundry - has a clear picture of:

•        Actual, realtime, item-level inventory in circulation

•        True ragout or discard rates (when items are retired from service)

•        Accurate shrinkage and loss figures with where the inventory was last seen (property or laundry).

•        What, when, and how much inventory to reorder.

The industry has collectively shrugged at this gap for so long that it's been normalized. Linen loss is just a "cost of doing business." Shrinkage is just something you budget for without really understanding. And that's been acceptable - until now.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Is Calculating

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most hotels have no idea what their linen program actually costs them.

They know the laundry invoice. They know the purchase order when they reorder. But the true cost is almost never calculated in full. They disregard carrying costs, emergency replacement orders, over-purchasing to compensate for unknown losses, staff hours spent on manual counts, and guest complaints tied to linen quality just to name a few.

In most properties, linen is treated as a fixed operational expense rather than a manageable asset. It shows up in the budget, gets paid, and largely goes unexamined. The assumption is that this is just the unavoidable, opaque, and largely uncontrollable cost of hospitality.

That assumption is wrong… and expensive.

From Horse and Cart to a Luxury Vehicle — In One Step

The leap from where most hotels are today to where RFID can take them isn't a small step forward. It's a generational transformation.

Think of it this way: the current state of linen inventory management is the horse and cart. It’s functional, familiar, but fundamentally limited. You get from A to B, but you're working extremely hard, you don't have great visibility into what's ahead, and your efficiency is capped by the nature of the system itself.

RFID tagging doesn’t just upgrade the cart. It skips the base model and hands you the keys to something truly luxurious and comfortable.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Item-Level Visibility

Each linen item is tagged with a unique RFID tag. For the first time, hotels and laundries can track individual items across their entire lifecycle - from injection through wash cycles, circulation, and ultimately end-of-life. No more blaming for loss. No more inventory guesswork.

Real-Time Inventory Accuracy

Manual counts become a thing of the past. Accuracy from manual counts are anticipated to be roughly 85% with a manual variance of 10-20%.

Leveraging stationary or handheld RFID equipment can inventory an entire linen room within a minute. The accuracy improves to 95-99%+ at a fraction of the operational time. Properties always know exactly what they have and where it is without sacrificing valuable labor hours on an inefficient task.

True Cost Visibility

For the first time, hotel managers can calculate the actual cost per item, per wash cycle, per room night. Linen stops being an opaque expense category and becomes a manageable, optimizable asset. One that can be benchmarked, analyzed, and improved over time.

The "It's Always Been This Way" Problem

One of the biggest obstacles to change in linen management isn't technical. It's cultural. When an industry has operated a certain way for long enough, the status quo becomes invisible. The inefficiencies stop feeling like problems and start feeling like facts of life.

"We've always done manual counts." "The laundry has always worked this way." "We just build in a buffer for loss."

These aren't operational strategies. They're rationalizations for a system that hasn't been challenged.

The hospitality industry has transformed itself in nearly every other dimension. Revenue management is AI-driven, the guest experience is hyper-personalized, energy systems are automated and optimized. Linen inventory, one of the largest variable operational costs a hotel faces, remains stubbornly analog.

That gap is closing. And the hotels that close it first will have a meaningful operational and financial advantage over those still counting sheets with a clipboard.

The Bottom Line

The current linen management methods get the job done. But "get the job done" is a low bar when the technology has arrived. Why 

RFID doesn't just solve the inventory visibility problem, it reframes what's possible by transforming linen from a cost center into a data-rich asset that can be managed with the same precision and intelligence that hotels apply to their revenue, their guests, and their operations.

It's time to put the clipboard down.

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About the Author

Mike Rispoli is VP of Product Management at Laundris, a technology company modernizing how the hospitality industry manages commercial laundry and linen services.

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