Towels and bathrobes have a habit of leaving hotels with guests. But items taken from guestrooms are only one source of hotel inventory loss. Linen can be damaged or misplaced during housekeeping and laundry operations, while cleaning supplies, equipment, staff uniforms and other items can also go missing.
For hotel operators, the financial impact goes beyond the cost of replacing individual items. Repeated losses increase purchasing requirements, tie up capital in additional stock and can leave housekeeping teams short of the supplies they need to keep rooms ready.
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The challenge is identifying what is actually happening to that inventory. A missing towel may have been taken by a guest, but it could also have been discarded because of damage, lost during laundry processing, moved to another part of the hotel or simply counted incorrectly.
Understanding where items are being lost – and why – is the first step towards bringing those costs under control.
Towels and robes are among the items most often taken by guests
Guestroom linen is one of the most visible sources of hotel inventory loss.
A Wellness Heaven survey of 1,376 hotel managers, conducted in September and October 2023 and published in January 2024, found that towels and bathrobes were the two items most frequently reported as stolen from hotel rooms. Hangers, pens and cosmetics followed.
More recent research points in the same direction. A January 2026 survey by Deluxe Holiday Homes of 1,239 hotel staff members and owners found that 88% of respondents had seen towels disappear or had heard about them being stolen. Bathrobes were identified by 66% of respondents, while blankets and pillows were identified by 36% and 32% respectively.
These figures need to be interpreted carefully. They show how often respondents identified particular items as commonly going missing; they do not show the proportion of a hotel’s inventory that is stolen.
There is no reliable global benchmark for the proportion of hotel inventory taken by guests. Claims that hotels routinely budget a fixed percentage specifically for stolen items are also not supported by robust industry-wide evidence.
The operational consequences can nevertheless be significant. Hotels need sufficient stocks of towels, sheets, robes and other items to service rooms, while recurring losses add to purchasing and replacement costs.
Not every missing towel has been taken by a guest
Treating every unexplained shortage as guest theft can give managers a misleading picture of where losses are occurring.
Hotel linen moves constantly between guestrooms, housekeeping trolleys, linen rooms, laundry collection points and, in many properties, external laundry facilities. This creates multiple opportunities for items to become damaged, misplaced, discarded or incorrectly recorded.
Research published by the Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA) has estimated that hotels can lose or discard around 15% to 20% of linen products before the end of their useful life. The figure covers premature loss and disposal rather than theft alone.
Possible causes include guest removal, accidental disposal, damage, misuse, handling problems and losses during laundry operations. Tracking becomes more difficult when linen regularly moves between a hotel and an external laundry provider.
For managers, the distinction matters. If a property assumes guests are responsible for a persistent towel shortage when the problem is actually occurring during laundry processing, measures aimed at discouraging guests from taking items will do little to reduce the underlying loss.
Look beyond the guestroom
Linen may be the most obvious example, but inventory losses can occur throughout a hotel.
Housekeeping departments handle cleaning chemicals, guest amenities, paper products, laundry supplies and equipment. Hotels may also hold significant inventories of uniforms and other textiles for employees.
Poor controls can make it difficult to establish where these items have gone. Supplies may be transferred between departments without being recorded, used without being properly accounted for or removed from stores without clear authorisation.
Cleaning chemicals require particular attention because they can be expensive and may also have safety implications. Hotels can improve control by defining where products are stored, who has access to them and how they are issued. Purchasing records can then be compared with expected consumption to identify unusual differences.
Staff uniforms present a different problem. A garment issued to an employee remains an asset until it is returned, replaced or formally written off. Without an issue-and-return record, hotels can quickly lose visibility over uniforms that have left the property.
The objective is not to burden housekeeping teams with unnecessary administration. It is to maintain a simple record of what entered the hotel, where it went and when it should have been returned, consumed or replaced.
Measure losses while they can still be investigated
Infrequent stocktakes can reveal the size of a shortage without explaining its cause.
If an annual count shows that 500 towels are missing, for example, management may know the replacement cost but have little chance of determining when the losses occurred or where in the operation they happened.
More frequent counts of high-risk items can identify discrepancies sooner. Hotels can compare expected stock with physical stock and investigate significant differences while information about recent movements is still available.
For linen, that means reconciling the entire movement cycle:
- stock held in linen rooms;
- linen issued to housekeeping;
- soiled linen sent to laundry;
- clean linen returned from laundry;
- linen transferred between departments or properties; and
- items formally removed from service.
Hotels should also distinguish between different types of loss. Damaged linen that has been properly written off is not the same as an unexplained shortage. Nor is normal consumption of guest amenities equivalent to stock that cannot be accounted for.
Separating these categories gives managers a clearer picture of where money is being lost.
Establish a property-specific baseline
There is no well-supported industry-wide percentage that hotels universally budget for items taken by guests or unexplained inventory losses. Published figures vary according to what inventory is measured, how loss is defined and the operating model of the property.
A more useful approach is for each hotel to establish its own baseline.
Management can track the value of items lost, damaged or written off against inventory held or purchased. The figures can then be broken down by category, such as towels, bed linen, robes, uniforms, housekeeping supplies and equipment.
Tracking individual categories makes changing patterns easier to identify.
A rise in towel losses at a resort, for example, could point to a problem around the pool or spa. An increase in missing linen after a change of laundry provider could indicate a handover or reconciliation problem. An unexpected increase in cleaning-supply consumption could warrant a review of purchasing, storage and issuing procedures.
The important question is not simply whether inventory is disappearing, but where the difference is occurring and what has changed.
Can RFID help hotels keep track of linen?
Technology can make the movement of hotel textiles more visible.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags give individual towels, sheets, robes or uniforms a unique identity. Readers positioned at selected points can record movements, such as linen leaving for laundry and subsequently returning to the hotel.
RFID does not prevent a guest from taking a bathrobe or stop a sheet from being accidentally discarded. Its value is in showing where items were last recorded and reducing dependence on manual counts.
RFID can also help hotels and laundry providers create a clearer record of textile movements between properties, laundries and other checkpoints. The technology is particularly relevant where a property processes large volumes of linen or relies heavily on an external laundry service.
The investment will not make sense for every property. Larger hotels, resorts and groups processing high volumes of linen may have more to gain from item-level tracking than smaller properties with relatively simple linen movements.
For smaller hotels, controlled stock locations, regular counts, clear responsibility and simple digital records can provide much of the visibility needed without a sophisticated tracking system.
Reduce losses without damaging the guest experience
Controls need to be proportionate. Hotels are hospitality businesses, and measures designed to prevent guests taking items should not make legitimate customers feel that they are under suspicion.
Many effective controls can therefore operate behind the scenes. Hotels can:
- assign responsibility for high-risk inventory categories;
- restrict access to stock areas where appropriate;
- record the issue and return of staff uniforms;
- reconcile linen sent to and returned from external laundries;
- conduct regular counts of high-risk stock;
- investigate unusual differences rather than accepting them as unavoidable;
- record damaged or discarded stock separately from unexplained losses; and
- consider RFID or other tracking technology where the scale of potential losses justifies the investment.
Hotels can also turn some guest demand into a commercial opportunity. Branded robes, towels or other desirable products can be made available for purchase, giving guests a legitimate way to take a reminder of their stay home while creating revenue rather than an unexplained replacement cost.
Make missing inventory a measurable cost
Hotels are unlikely to eliminate inventory losses completely. Guests will sometimes take items, linen will become damaged, stock will be misplaced and mistakes will occur as thousands of items move through a property.
Accepting unexplained losses as an inevitable cost of doing business, however, is different.
Rather than asking only how many towels, robes or uniforms have disappeared, managers should ask where an item was last accounted for, why it is no longer in inventory and what replacing it costs.
Regular reconciliation, clear accountability and appropriate technology can make those answers easier to find. The goal is not to account for every towel at any cost. It is to make losses visible enough to distinguish normal replacement from preventable costs – and to act when those costs become significant.
