Your luxury hotel bedding is one of your property’s signature amenities. Guests rave about how soft the sheets are, how well they sleep and how pampered they feel. They’re so impressed, they shop your linens in the gift shop to replicate your Hotel Bed experience at home.
The proper care of such an important – and costly – investment deserves its own place in your housekeeping training program, especially if you want to maximize your linens’ lifecycle.
Here are training topics to keep in mind to protect your luxury hotel bedding.
Strong Sorting
A sample hotel housekeeping checklist is a key piece of your customer-focused hospitality training manual, and it’s an excellent opportunity to detail proper sorting of your luxury hotel bedding, towels, robes and table linens.
Stress the importance of separating heavily soiled or damaged linens so that they can either be specially treated or removed from your hotel linen supply.
Comfortable Storage
Yes, that’s right, “comfortable”: Your hotel linens need a safe place to rest between uses to prevent an early trip to the rag pile.
Make sure staff are trained in storage best practices, including:
- Keeping the storage area temperature- and climate-controlled
- Storing cleaning supplies and other chemicals elsewhere to avoid spills
- Giving linens a rest between uses
Par Level Management
Good par level managment will ensure that your linens get the rest they need. Skating by with just enough pars may seem cost effective, but it can cost you more in the long run as you have to replace your hotel linens more frequently and you run the risk of running out when you need them most.
The number of pars recommended by hospitality experts is four: 1 in the guest room + 1 waiting in storage + 1 on the way to the laundry + 1 being cleaned.
Include managing par levels in your training, as well as the proper way to conduct an inventory.
Laundry Machine Maintenance
If you handle laundry onsite, your commercial laundry equipment, from the laundry chute to the ironer, is what makes your laundry operation tick. If machines aren’t properly maintained, however, they can also inadvertently become a source of damage to your luxury hotel bedding and other linens.
Train staff to routinely check for loose pieces in the chute that can snag or rip linens, as well as oil or grease on equipment that can leave stains. Ideally, through training, you can catch equipment issues before they affect your linens.
Laundry Provider Partnership
If you partner with a hotel linen laundry service for your laundry, be sure to take advantage of their training resources.
A large-scale laundry service will hold initial onboarding training for your staff when you sign on with them and periodically to discuss any issues. The training sessions can focus on not just your relationship with the provider but other linen protection and care topics as well.
Field Trip
In addition to conducting training for your staff at your property, the right laundry provider will also offer tours of their facility for key members of your housekeeping and management teams.
The tours can be enlightening training opportunities as your staff gets to see how efficiently the laundry service works and the steps they take to make sure your linens are well cared for.
Keep Training on Track
Your housekeeping team may be all that stands between your guests and less-than-perfect linens, and your training in housekeeping should emphasize the role they play in the guest experience.
In addition to giving tactical tips for how to protect your luxury hotel bedding and other linens, be sure to give staff a sense for the link between how they do their jobs and how guests feel about their time with you.
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