Lost linens cost a hotel three things added together: the pieces it has to replace, the hours spent counting, and the extra purchases made to cover shortages. In a hypothetical example of 4,000 pieces with 15% annual loss, the first two alone come to MXN 133,800 a year.
That figure is only an example, and your number will be different. The formula is the useful part, because very few hotels add it all up: replacement sits in purchasing, the hours sit in payroll, and arguments with the laundry don't appear anywhere.
How much usually goes missing
No independent study sets a rate for the whole industry. What exists are figures from trade publications and vendors. Hotel Online reports that annual shrinkage of 15 to 20% is not unusual. A case published by RFID Journal, about a luxury hotel in Los Angeles, describes 20 to 30% of stock missing before piece-level control and about 3% after.
Handle those numbers with care. They mix theft, laundry damage and counting errors, and the second one is a vendor case with no control group. They give you the order of magnitude. The rate that matters is yours, and to get it you have to count.
The formula
You need five figures from your hotel:
- Pieces in inventory.
- Average replacement cost per piece.
- Annual loss rate: pieces lost or written off early, divided by total inventory.
- Hours per day spent counting linen.
- Hourly cost of whoever does the counting.
An example with hypothetical numbers
The figures below are made up to show the math. Swap in your own.
Picture a hotel with 4,000 pieces, an average replacement cost of MXN 150 per piece and a 15% annual loss. That is 600 pieces a year. At MXN 150 each, it comes to MXN 90,000 in replacements.
Now the counting. If shipments are counted by hand, that can take up to two hours of a housekeeper's day. Two hours over 365 days is 730 hours a year. At a hypothetical MXN 60 an hour, that adds MXN 43,800.
Total for the example: MXN 133,800 a year, and that still leaves out the costs you can't see in the sum.
What the math leaves out
Three more costs are hard to measure, and you pay them all the same:
- Emergency purchases. When sets run short, you buy quickly and in small quantities, which almost always costs more.
- Buffer stock. Since you don't know how much you have, you overbuy to stay safe, and that money sits in a storeroom.
- Slower rooms. If a room attendant can't find a full set, the room is released later.
Why it's so hard to see where linen goes
A piece can disappear in many places: in the room, on a cart, in a floor closet, on the truck or at the laundry. With a manual count at the end of the day, all you learn is that the total is off. You don't know which piece is missing, since when, or at which stage it was lost.
That is why losses get negotiated. The hotel says it sent 300 towels, the laundry says it received 285, and neither has a record the other accepts. They split the difference, and nobody fixes the cause.
How to bring the number down
Start by measuring. Do a full physical count today and repeat it in 30 days, adding what you bought and subtracting what you wrote off. The gap is your real loss for the month, and from there you can estimate the year.
Then put a record at every handover: leaving the hotel, arriving at the plant, coming back. Signed sheets can do the job at low volume. At high volume, the option is an RFID chip in each piece.
Our system works like this: every piece carries a chip, gets scanned at pickup and at delivery, and checking a full cart takes 30 seconds. Pieces unseen for more than 30 days are listed automatically, with their last date and replacement cost. The record won't stop anyone from taking a towel, but it tells you it's missing and when it was last seen, and that ends the argument over the total.
Work out your number before deciding anything. If it comes back low, carry on as you are. If it surprises you, you now know how much you can spend to fix it.