The biggest challenges that face the hospitality industry nowadays are the growing cost of linen supplies and the difficulty of managing the inventory of bed sheets, tablecloths, towels, bathrobes, uniforms, hampers and other washable garments.  The increasing price of cotton continually drives up the cost of linens and garments, making it especially important to maximize the use of each item.  Some of the issues that increase expenditure include theft, damage to items, billing discrepancies and others.  Hotels, theme parks, cruise ships, casinos, resorts, arenas and related businesses worldwide have a limited idea of how much these are costing them, especially since they have a hard time keeping track of where each garment is at any particular point in time.

Hotel Management System RFID Solution
It is a general process when you go to a hotel or a holiday resort center that a receptionist attends to a customer after which the receptionist gives the customers several things that the customer has to take care of in addition to his luggage and personal belongings.
The customer is give a room key or key card, an identification card, one or more breakfast coupons, a bar coupon, a casino pass, etc. this customer is expected to keep all this cards or tickets as the case may be intact and use them whenever he wants to use any of the facilities.
To the normal leisure traveler, this is very irritating. S/he has come to a hotel or resort to enjoy or relax and not to keep track of various scraps of papers. But for the hotel or resort, they have to ensure that it’s the genuine customer that makes use of the facilities, track the usage if coupons and gather other information.

Existing Problems with old system

• Burden of carrying all those paper stuff all the time, in addition to taking care of other essential belongings like cameras.
• Imagine a parent travelling with young children, the he must have multiple of such coupon sets to take care of
• The coupons or access passes might be misplaced or the parent realizes on getting to the venue that the access cards or passes has been left in the room, walking back to the room might really be a pain to this customer hence reducing customer satisfaction and experience
• The hotel staff has to issue and redeem these coupons and passes based on the tariff and meal plans or packages that the guests have bought. This manual system is not easy to manage at all.
• Reconciliation of used coupons with issued ones is difficult, hence a lot of useful data cannot be had (like how many guest used the casino, bowling room, swimming pool etc)

With the use of the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), all this issues and more can be erased with ease while giving good customer satisfaction and experience that would bring back again, financial profit (ROI), security and good inventory controls just to mention a few.

Tracking linens with RFID
Luckily, Tramelton Corporation has created new high-tech radio-frequency identification (RFID) solutions for linen and garment tracking. Washable RFID tags assist companies in the hospitality industry in monitoring these difficult-to-manage assets even through different properties and laundering services.  Having washable RFID labels mean that these tracking devices can survive not just getting wet, but also getting washed, tumbled and dried. These RFID tags are usually tiny and are sealed in protective material housing, which keeps it secure.  It retains accuracy and performance even after numerous uses. They can be attached to all types of garments by pinning, sewing or tying, after which the information can be captured and stored in a database in real time.  The RFID tags are able to resist water and withstand extreme pressure, temperature and chemicals.  They can survive conditions introduced by laundry services, such as dry cleaning and textile rental.

Tracking linens with Tramelton’s RFID Solution
Using Tramelton’s LINOtags, items like towels, bathrobes and sheets are tagged, scanned and monitored in real time from the check-in and check-out stations, the closet, the pool, the spa, the beach and through the laundry. If a guest for instance carries the tagged towel in his room and places it among its belongings when leaving, the RFID reader on scanning the customer and his luggage would raise an alarm that will alert the security who would request for a search, this also safe guard the properties of the hotel from the customer angle.