The Hidden Costs Hotels Miss When Budgeting for Linen

For many hotels, linen budgeting begins with a relatively straightforward calculation: determine current inventory, estimate replacement needs, account for projected occupancy, and build the anticipated purchase into next year’s budget.

Ryan Kinch, Hotel Manager of Hotel Drover, Autograph Collection, in Fort Worth, Texas, believes that approach misses much of the real cost.

The problem, he says, is that hotels often treat linen primarily as a purchasing expense, even though its impact extends much further into operations. Loss and damage matter, of course, but so does the labor required to count and distribute linen, the productivity lost when employees cannot find what they need, and even the effect poor linen control can have on morale and turnover.

“When you’re looking at the operation from 5,000 feet, everything looks great on paper,” Kinch said. “But you don’t truly know where the towels are, where the sheets are, where the comforters are.”

That lack of visibility can make an apparently sound linen budget unreliable almost as soon as it is created.

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Inventory Numbers Can Become Outdated Quickly

Hotels typically establish a target number of linen sets, or PAR, and budget purchases designed to reach or maintain that level. But Kinch said loss and damage throughout the year can make those projections difficult to sustain.

“You want to reach full par. That’s always your goal,” he said. “You underestimate the loss that you’re going to have throughout the year. You underestimate the damage that you’re going to have.”

The problem becomes more pronounced when inventory is conducted manually.

Some hotels count linen monthly, others quarterly, and some even less frequently. Between inventories, sheets, towels, and other items can be damaged, discarded, misplaced, or moved throughout the property.

By the time management reviews the latest count, the number may already be obsolete.

“If those latest numbers were done a month ago, it’s already changed,” Kinch said.

Manual inventories also introduce another variable: human error. Team members count linen in closets and on floors, enter the numbers into spreadsheets, and compare them with previous inventories. If the numbers appear wrong, employees may have to repeat the process.

That creates both a budgeting and an operational problem.

A hotel may enter the year expecting to reach a certain percentage of par by the end of the first quarter, only to discover that actual inventory is significantly lower than expected. Management then has to find additional funds elsewhere in the operating budget to cover the shortfall.

The Cost Is Bigger Than Linen Replacement

Replacement purchases are only one component of linen expense.

Kinch encourages hotel leaders to consider the labor surrounding linen management as well.

Employees spend time sorting linen, moving it throughout the property, stocking closets, and searching for items that are not where they are expected to be. Those activities affect productivity and ultimately cost per occupied room, or CPOR.

“You’re not just talking about the linen expense,” Kinch said. “You’re also talking about your team members, your cost per occupied room, and your productivity cost as well.”

The consequences can extend to employee experience.

Housekeeping employees depend on linen in much the same way other employees depend on functioning tools and equipment. When room attendants begin their shifts without knowing whether the linen they need will be available, a routine task becomes unnecessarily difficult.

“They’re scrambling to get the operation done,” Kinch said. “That has an impact on their daily productivity. It has an impact on their mindset, which can lead to higher turnover.”

Turnover carries its own costs, including recruitment, onboarding, and training.

“If your team members have the tools and equipment to do their job, and in housekeeping, that is linen, they’re going to be happy,” Kinch said. “If we can’t provide those basics to them, that is going to lead to turnover.”

That makes linen control part of a much larger financial equation than the purchase price of sheets and towels alone.

A Different Way to Think About the 2027 Budget

As hotels prepare their 2027 budgets, Kinch believes operators should question whether traditional linen-management practices still make sense.

“We’re in 2026 heading into 2027,” he said. “The old ways of doing linen, which is counting it manually, doing it once a quarter, doing it once a month, doing it twice a year, whatever that may be for a hotel, that need to stop.”

His recommendation is to evaluate technology, particularly RFID-based linen tracking. 

Kinch acknowledges that he was initially skeptical.

“I was not the first one who believed in RFID technology,” he said. “I was very skeptical of it.”

His perspective changed after seeing what greater inventory visibility could do operationally. 

Rather than evaluating RFID solely as a capital expense, Kinch recommends viewing the investment through the lens of CPOR.

Hotel leaders can calculate their current linen-related CPOR, including houseperson and room attendant labor, and compare it with the expected cost after implementing RFID technology.

“You’ll see that it’s not a huge investment when you look at it from a CPOR perspective,” he said.

The potential benefit comes from knowing how much linen is available, where it is located, what is off-property at an outside laundry facility, and even how often individual pieces have been washed.

That visibility can reduce both loss and the time employees spend managing inventory.

From a Monthly Count to Daily Visibility

At Kinch’s hotel, the difference has been significant. A process that once consumed about two hours each month — and could still produce questionable numbers — now takes roughly 20 minutes.

“We do that twice a day,” he said. “I can tell you where our linen is. I can tell you how much of our linen we have.”

That information is also shared with the housekeeping team at the beginning of the day.

The result is not simply a more accurate spreadsheet. It changes how employees work.

Without clear inventory controls, linen can become unevenly distributed throughout a hotel. Employees may place additional supplies on particular floors for colleagues they work closely with, leaving other attendants to search elsewhere for what they need.

“You’re not running from floor 10 to floor 2 to get towels because that’s where team member A stashed all the towels,” Kinch said.

With improved visibility, linen can be distributed more evenly. Employees know where supplies are located before they begin cleaning rooms, which reduces unnecessary movement and interruptions.

Kinch said the result has been a more productive and happier housekeeping team. He also points to improvements in guest-facing performance.

“We have the highest cleanliness scores in the history of our hotel,” he said. “Our cleanliness scores right now are about 96%. We’re at 95.8 year to date.”

He does not attribute that improvement to a fundamentally different cleaning process.

“It’s because all of our tools are accessible at all times,” he said.

Budget for the Process, Not Just the Product

For GMs and directors of finance, Kinch’s larger recommendation is to examine hotel processes that remain labor-intensive simply because they have always been done that way.

“Look at operating processes,” he said. “What are we truly doing that can be streamlined? What can we do that will make our jobs easier, make our team members’ jobs easier?”

For housekeeping, linen control provides a clear example.

Better inventory visibility can reduce counting time, minimize misplaced inventory, improve distribution, increase productivity, and help reduce employee frustration. Faster, better-equipped housekeeping teams can also turn rooms more efficiently, helping get guests checked in sooner.

The investment may occur in one budget category, but the return can show up across several.

“It’s an upfront investment,” Kinch said, “but the investment pays for itself over time.”

That may be the most important shift for hotel leaders heading into the 2027 budgeting cycle.

Instead of asking only how much linen the property needs to purchase next year, they may need to ask a broader question: How much is the current way of managing linen already costing us?

Curious how Laundris can help your property cut linen costs? Let’s connect >>

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