ORLANDO, Fla. — Over the past year, Rosen Hotels & Resorts located here, has been renovating rooms in two of its seven properties: the 800-room Rosen Plaza Hotel and the 1,500-room Rosen Shingle Creek Resort.
“It’s a modernization, updating them from top to bottom,” says Nick Fertig, director of laundry for Rosen and a member of the American Laundry News Editorial Advisory Board. “Corridors inside the rooms, all of the furniture, completely different bathrooms, the whole nine yards.
“You design the room. You get samples in. You set up multiple mock rooms to see what the design looks like. You invite salespeople in, marketing people in, executives in. Everybody takes a look to see which room they like, what style they like. What do the salespeople think would hit our customer base better, trying to cater to the clientele and different things?
“Once you decide on the room that you want, then you’ve got all of the manufacturing that has to take place for all the furniture that you’ve selected and getting all that stuff done with delivery dates, selecting general contractors, liquidating existing furniture — planning that whole process out before you even take your first room out for the so-called renovation.”
Fertig has been deeply involved in the process because new linens are a key part of Rosen’s room updates.
LAUNDRY INPUT
Fertig has been involved in the process at almost every step because he has relationships with different linen vendors.
“We have a procurement department that will basically send out the RFP, but I can make suggestions as to who I think the RFP should be sent out to, who are the big players, who are other people in town that they’ve had success with,” he says.
“We send out an RFP to the vendors that have been selected with the specifications of our current linen. What is the size of the pool towels? What is the poundage of the terry? What is the thread count of the sheets? What is the poly-cotton makeup that we’re currently using?”
Rosen has the linen vendors send pricing for what they offer from their inventory, as close to what the hotel is looking for. It also asks the vendors to send samples for review.
Rosen also asks vendors, if the requested linen samples aren’t what they would suggest to have in the rooms, to also send pricing and samples of what they think would better serve the hotels.
“My main function for this whole thing is to test-wash everything, putting it through the works in our washers, in our dryers, in our ironers,” Fertig shares. “How does it finish? How does it hold up? What is the likelihood that it’s going to stay in this shape for a long period of time? What do I think about stain removal? What am I seeing for finishing quality?
“When I’m looking at it, if this sheet is 75 cents to a dollar more, is that value really something that we’re seeing with the finished product, or is it durable enough? Do we really need Egyptian cotton? All that sort of stuff.
“Some of the more specialized top sheets nowadays have almost like a texture to them, different things that make finishing on the ironing lines harder. Maybe it’s an embroidered border, and that embroidered part will kind of stick up a little bit to where the ironing pads can’t really get a good iron around that, and you see some wrinkling. I’ll ask for best practices.
“But, truthfully, if there is any sort of specialized chemicals or wash process or specific drying instructions where it can’t go above a certain temperature, I personally would more than likely eliminate them from consideration. I’m not interested in having fragile stuff in the operation. Also, with the potential for human error, I don’t want to ruin product or have to have multiple different formulas.
“I want to have a formula for sheets. I want to have a formula for bath towels. I want to have a formula for pillowcases. I want to be able to put every single sheet, every single pillowcase, every single bath towel we have through the same formula.”
He’s not interested in seven different hotels having seven different formulas for seven different bath towels.
“There’s a lot of consideration in that,” he says. “I’m involved in those conversations, too, about things you don’t think of. For instance, we have top sheets, and we have bottom sheets. The top sheet is the decorative one that goes on top. In the past, we’ve used things that are maybe like block-on-block designs or strike designs. What happens is, over time, those designs fade, and it becomes really hard, unless you hit the right angle of light, to determine whether that design is on that sheet or whether it’s not on that sheet.
“As we build carts for the hotels, having experienced that, I’m looking for something that is going to be more easily distinguishable over time. That way, my catchers at the end of my cart-building line aren’t having to basically break out a microscope (to determine what type of sheet it is). Anything that adds more labor, adds a process, adds a step or anything like that within the laundry is closely looked at.”
Derek Baum, Rosen’s vice president of facilities and building operations, considers Rosen’s laundry team as its in-house linen experts.
“They handle every item that reaches our guest rooms and have firsthand insight into durability, finishing quality, stain resistance, and processing efficiency,” he says. “Their perspective is essential to making informed decisions. Since they’re responsible for delivering a consistently high-quality product to our end users, it would be a missed opportunity not to leverage their expertise in the selection process.”
Fertig says there has to be a “harmony” between the vision of what the linen could be in a room and what makes the most sense in terms of processing capability and efficiency.
“Those who aren’t involved with a laundry operation have what they envision the room should be like without really any direct connection as to what effect that has on the (laundry) operation,” he points out.
“If they had their way, there would probably be a lot of different things in the room that would be really cool to have, but the overall impact on the operation might mean that my pounds per operator hour (PPOH) is impacted dramatically, and that increase in labor has to be offset somewhere.
“So, as we make these nice, cool, fancy rooms, are we going to see our ADR — our average daily rate for what we sell these rooms — go up enough or is it going to match the increased labor to where it’s not an impact on the organization’s revenue and profit overall?”
Food-and-beverage and banquet teams are generally notorious for this, Fertig says.
“They’ll get this very shiny, crinkly, extravagant, 132-inch round tablecloth that looks great. It’s beautiful, but when they send me the washing and drying instructions, basically, I can’t send it through my ironer,” he says. “I’d have to hand-iron it. My iron (temperature) doesn’t even get that low to process it, but they just don’t know.
“That’s the importance of test-washing. Nothing is worse for a laundry operator when a decision is made and all of a sudden, a new product shows up in your laundry and (management) is like, ‘Surprise, we bought 300 of these.’ OK, great. I guess I’ll figure it out.”
Miss part 1 about Rosen’s room renovations and linen RFPs? Click HERE to read it. Check back Thursday for the conclusion about the room/linen transition schedule and key takeaways from the process.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
