Your Choice Of Hotel Linen Sets The Tone For Everything

For those in the hospitality business, the customer experience is something that is foremost on everyone’s mind. From the hotel or resort lobby to the lifts, escalators, dining rooms and toilets, image counts for so very much. Perhaps one of the more important aspects, though, is the choice an hotelier makes regarding what goes on the beds.

The Linens Often Make the First Impression

When a guest first arrives at the hotel, it’s entirely possible that their immediate surroundings don’t make much of an impact on them. Those arriving at especially late hours will undoubtedly notice things in the lobby in the morning that they missed upon arrival, but what they are really looking forward to is the bed and bedsheets. Most travellers expect to sleep on beds that are far more comfortable than the ones they have at home, and so they actually pay little attention to the hotel linens at first. The mattress, from size to softness, is their primary concern as they drift off due to fatigue and, depending on their place of origin, jet lag, induced slumber land.

While your guests might be overly concerned with getting some rest in the immediate moments after arrival, when they awake in the morning, they’ll look at the bedsheets, rubbing them down, checking their quality. It will have dawned on them that they are truly in a hotel, and just as the mattress will be judged based on its comfort relative to the one they have back home, they will also be judging your establishment based on what’s covering the mattress itself. If it’s not the highest quality stuff, they’ll turn up their nose and won’t recommend the place to their friends. If, however, it makes a positive impression, you could have repeat customers in the future.

The Bath Is Due for Some Scrutiny Too

Next up, the bathroom. What size bath towels do you supply your guests with, and what are they made of? Egyptian cotton is generally considered one of the more comfortable varieties of cotton. Anyway, what about the face cloths? How big are they, and are they nice to touch, or will they be rough on a guest’s face? The same consideration should be shown for the hand towels, often a guest’s last touched object before they head out of their washroom in particular or hotel room in general. Finally, it’s a bit of a cliché, but does your hotel offer bath robes? The idea of hanging around a room, clad only in a bathrobe, is an exciting one for many travellers, especially those staying in high-end hotels.

Guests choose your hotel for a reason, but if anything on the bed or in the bathroom area seems cheap or uncomfortable, you can bet they’ll write about it on their customer feedback cards and talk about it when they return home. Even well-regarded of hotels can have a bad batch of linens, belying their supposedly deserved reputations. Likewise, a low-end hotel might overcharge you for what they have on offer, but the weary traveller might forgive a dingy hotel its overpriced room and lack of room-service if the bedding and towels are up to snuff, and might even give a high rating if they find a bathrobe awaiting them in the wardrobe.

If you haven’t already realised by now, you should be paying the utmost attention to your linen choices. A bed and breakfast is, these days, expected to offer many of the same amenities as a major five-star hotel, at least as far as the linens are concerned. If you’re at a loss as to what types of linen to choice, you can look into a Stalbridge hotel linen supplier to see the many options you have to ensure your guests have a truly comfortable and memorable time in your establishment, the kind they wouldn’t mind rating positively online and recommending to their families and friends.

Don’t Go Cheap in the Restaurants or Banquet Halls Either

You might also be surprised – though it would be regrettable if this were so – to find that the hotel linens you must be concerned about are often also those found in the restaurants of your hotel. If you’re a bed and breakfast, you have much less to worry about. A regular hotel, however, cannot afford to skimp and provide cheap table cloths and rough napkins. Business travellers especially might be concerned about the quality of the linens in the restaurant, since that could be where they end up hosting the clients they’ve come to see or the guests they wish to host.

If your hotel is big enough to hold meetings or conventions in banquet halls, this will be of special importance. In this case, it is not merely the guests who will see everything you have on offer, but local businesses and executives. No opportunities to advertise and fill rooms should be missed, and hosting a convention or expo is a chance to show off your linens to prospective guests. Local businesses will be particularly interested in your ability to provide any guests they fly in or host with the most comfortable experience imaginable, as their reputation is on the line as much as yours is.

For the particularly savvy hotel owner or manager, it also might be tempting to offer embroidered linens for guests to take home with them. Of course, this is only likely to happen for the most high-priced, high-quality hotels unless what you’re offering guests meets or exceeds what they can get for a thousand pounds more in the city centre. In any case, if you are successful at building your brand and reputation in this way, it would be wise to keep an extra supply of bedding and other linens – including bathrobes – in easy reach of hotel staff, in case guests want to pay a little more to take a piece of their experience in your hotel home with them.

Don’t be surprised if you get the right linens and suddenly your bath robes are disappearing, likely stuffed last minute into your guests’ luggage before they check out. If that’s happening, you might be upset, but at least you could take comfort in that you’re doing something right with your hotel linens!