The Different Types of Hotel Linen You Can Hire

Hotel linen is a broad term for a range of essential linens that are designed to provide comfort, quality and an unrivalled guest experience for your hotel. Hotel linen includes everything from bathroom towels, to bed sheets and kitchen cloths and beyond, which is exactly why ensuring your linen is fresh, clean and effortlessly maintained is a major part of hotel management. Below, we analyse the different types of hotel linen used in the industry.

Types Of Hotel Linen

Hotel linens will vary depending on the room or function they are responsible for. From guest bedrooms to restaurant dining experiences, linen is everywhere in hotels. Below, we outline the different types of linen used by hotels depending on the room, application or function.

Bedroom

A considerable portion of your hotel linen will be dedicated to your guest bedrooms, with enough linen required to cover each and every room in your hotel, as well as a provisional supply to ensure regular washing is carried out, without the risk of running low on resources. In hotel bedrooms, it’s expected you will have the following types of commercial linen:

• Pillowcases
• Bedsheets
• Duvet Covers

Hotel bed linen must be kept in a clean, pristine condition, with guest expectations especially high in this sector of hospitality. In fact, most people believe that a hotel stay should deliver a first-class experience that ultimately exceeds the comfort and cleanliness of their own homes, delivering luxury commercial linen that will guarantee a good night’s rest.

Bathroom

A positive hotel experience for any guest won’t just come down to the cleanliness and comfort of your bed sheets, it will also rely heavily on the quality of your bathroom linen. In every hotel bathroom, a range of towels and linens are required, these typically include:

• Hand Towel
• Bath Towel
• Face Cloth
• Bath Mat
• Bath Sheet
• Robe

Bathroom linen, particularly bath and hand towels, is an essential component of a positive guest experience, with soft, pearly white cotton towels a symbol of class and quality. Towels that are discoloured, rough on the skin or clearly past their best will lead to a negative customer experience, with discomfort and poor absorption common examples of issues.  Hiring a commercial linen company will ensure your bathroom lines are kept clean, fresh and comfortable every time.

Kitchen

One of the busiest and crucial parts of maintaining your hotel's cleanliness and safety standards is ensuring your kitchen linen is of the highest quality. From breakfast buffets to late-night dinners, a kitchen is a near-constant operation for most hotels, with chefs and kitchen staff requiring comfortable, high-quality linen to perform at their best. Hotel kitchen linen should include the following:

• Chef’s Uniform
• Aprons
• Polo Shirts
• Cloths

Hiring a professional linen hire company for your kitchen linen and chef whites will provide comfortable, finest-quality chef linen. This will further ensure food hygiene standards are met, cross-contamination is kept to a minimum and comfort is maintained even in hot conditions. Chefs wear white purely because it offers a visual indication of dirty or contaminated clothing, whilst the white itself helps repel heat instead of absorbing, keeping you cool no matter the conditions of the environment.

Restaurant

If your hotel has a kitchen, it’s likely you’ll have a restaurant too. This, of course, only means one thing; more linen! The finest quality restaurant linen is pivotal to your guest’s dining experience, transforming your space into one of luxury. Hotel restaurant linen should involve the following:

• Table Linen
• Napkins
• Glass Cloths
• Waiters Cloths

A perfect dining table delivers clean, ironed tablecloths that stand out with pristine presentation and colour, ensuring a memorable guest experience. Restaurant hotel linen can be provided in a range of colours to match your brand or stylist choices, whilst napkins can be made to match. Waiters and table staff, meanwhile, will need cloths and glass cloths on their person at all times, to cover for spills and watermarks, or for wiping/carrying plates before serving them.

Choosing Your Fabrics

Hotel linen is generally designed using cotton or a blend of cotton and polyester, as these deliver increased levels of durability with excellent quality and comfort to match. Below, we take a closer look at the importance of choosing the right fabric for your hotel bedrooms and offer advice on how to get the best out of your fabrics.

Cotton

Easily the most popular and utilised fabric for hotel bed linen, cotton is an ideal solution, due in no small part to the soft, breathable material. Not only this, but cotton is highly durable, affordable and easy to maintain, keeping your costs low and your whites sparkling for the long term. Cotton will hold its whiteness even after multiple washes, and because of the breathable fabric, it can be ideally used in both summer and winter.

Polycotton

A perfect blend of highly durable cotton and polyester materials, polycotton is a cost-effective, long-lasting material used for hotel linens. Able to withstand repeated washes without sacrificing quality and comfort, polycotton is often preferred for fabrics of colour, maintaining their brightness for longer than cotton or polyester alone.

Colours & Patterns

Whilst most hotel linens are white, as this typically conveys a sense of cleanliness, freshness and minimalism in design, they can also come in a range of patterns, colours and styles to match your hotel’s aesthetic. Of course, should you opt for this, you should ensure all your linens match the colour, style and quality of your bed sheets.

Thread Count

An important method of determining the quality of the material, your linen's thread count is an indication of comfort and quality. Defined as the number of threads woven into the sheet lengthways and breadthwise per square inch, thread counts are typically broken down into the following categories:

• 120-170?: Basic, lightweight and affordable, these sheets are thin and are primarily used in hospitals.
• 200?: Light cotton sheets, these are ideal for summer months and budget hotels.
• 400?: These sheets are the most commonly used in the hotelier industry, offering high durability and comfort, whilst remaining cool and lightweight.
• 600?: Soft, thick and high-quality, these sheets will last for the long term.
• 800-1000?: The finest luxury sheets available, these hotel bed sheets will provide a perfect guest experience.

In short; the higher the thread count the greater the quality of the cotton, with linens offering a thread count of 1000? guaranteed to deliver a comfortable, luxury guest experience.

Why Choose A Professional Linen Hire Company? 

Employing the expertise of a professional linen hire company will make a significant impact on all hotel operations, ensuring all your bed sheets, towels, napkins and tablecloths are clean, soft and fresh. Choosing a linen hire company will reduce time spent on laundry, freeing up space to focus on other key areas of the business, safe in the knowledge your linens are being cleaned and maintained all year round.

Johnsons Stalbridge Linen Services - Hotel, Restaurant and Catering Linen

Looking for bed linen hire? Here at Johnsons Stalbridge Linen Services, we’re proud to have over 40 years of experience providing linen hire and industrial laundry services for caterers, hotels and restaurants. We’ve built a loyal base of customers over the years, thanks to our exceptional quality of service, reliability, and a flexible method of working which ensures customers aren’t tied into long-term contracts.

We understand just how important it is to ensure your guests are not disappointed when they check into your hotel. Providing the very best hotel laundry for your guests is essential for the quality of their stay. All of our hotel bed linen goes through rigorous quality control to ensure our customers receive only the best quality linen.

We deliver all services promptly and pride ourselves on fixing any problems which may arise quickly and effectively.  Contact us today.