Friday: the hotel is full and wants twice the sheets
A city centre hotel has a standing delivery, sized for a normal week. On Friday housekeeping rings: a conference and a wedding have filled every room for the weekend, and they need far more bed linen and towels than usual. Your plant is already busy. Your stock of king-size sheets is thin because another hotel took extra last week.
The packing team scrapes together what it can, the van makes an extra trip, and on Monday the hotel sends back a mountain of soiled linen that swamps the washroom. The following week occupancy drops, and the standing delivery leaves the hotel's linen room overflowing.
Every week, someone is either short or overloaded, and it is always a surprise.
Multiply that across a dozen hotels with different events calendars, school holidays, conference seasons and the odd coach party, and the plant is reacting all week to demand it could have seen coming. The only people who know what next week looks like are the housekeeping managers, and nobody asks them.
Deliveries are fixed, demand is not
Standing orders are set once, when the contract is signed, and rarely changed. Hotels know their occupancy weeks ahead, but that knowledge never reaches the laundry.
- Par levels per room type are agreed loosely or not written down.
- Occupancy forecasts are not shared with the laundry.
- Actual usage per hotel is not compared with the standing order.
- Extra requests arrive at the last minute by phone.
- Stock planning across all hotels is done by instinct.
The root problem is information, not capacity. The hotel knows what is coming; you do not.
Short hotels, strained plants, surplus stock
Running short means rushed extra runs and unhappy housekeeping teams. Overloaded Mondays mean overtime and late deliveries for everyone else. Over-delivering on quiet weeks fills hotel linen rooms with your stock, which then goes missing or ages faster. Across a portfolio of hotels, you end up buying more linen than you need, because you cannot see where it is needed when.
How we build par level planning
- For each hotel, we record the agreed par per occupied room by item type, as set in your contract or agreed with housekeeping.
- Where a hotel agrees, we take a weekly occupancy forecast, either from a simple form housekeeping fills in, or from an export or feed from their property management system.
- The planner calculates expected linen demand per hotel per day for the coming week or two.
- Actual usage from your soiled counts is compared with the forecast, so par levels can be adjusted with evidence.
- Your planners see total demand across all hotels by day and item type, against your stock and plant capacity.
- Hotels whose forecast jumps get a proposed delivery change, confirmed by the account manager before it goes to packing.
| Planning question | Today | With par level planning |
|---|---|---|
| How much will this hotel need Saturday? | Find out on Friday | Forecast from occupancy |
| Is the standing order right? | Never checked | Compared with actual usage |
| Do we have enough king-size sheets? | Instinct | Demand against stock by item |
| Will Monday swamp the washroom? | Surprise | Soiled return estimate |
Hotels are not obliged to share forecasts. Where they will not, the planner uses their usage history, which is still better than a fixed order.
A week you can see coming
On Tuesday your planner can see that two hotels expect a busy weekend and a third is quiet. Stock is moved accordingly, the washroom plans for a heavy Monday, and housekeeping gets its linen without the Friday phone call. At contract review, the account manager can discuss par levels with actual numbers.
Is this your laundry?
- Hotels ring at the last minute for large extra deliveries.
- Standing orders have not changed since the contract started.
- Some weeks hotel linen rooms are overflowing with your stock.
- Mondays swamp the washroom after busy weekends.
- You buy stock based on gut feel rather than forecast demand.