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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Wait, towels have RFID tags?! Never heard of that before.

The hotel probably uses a commercial laundry service. All the dirty towels go into a bin, and every few days a van from the laundry service delivers a pile of clean towels and takes away the bin of dirty towels. The bedsheets, pillow cases and duvet covers probably get the same treatment.

You can get similar services for mechanics' overalls, door mats, chef's uniforms, and things like that. They'll even put the right uniform in the right employee's locker, if you like [1].

Often there will be different pools for different hotels, as well as different pools for different items and sizes. Good inventory management helps you get the customers' orders right; you don't want to deliver a Holiday Inn towel to a Hilton, or have a tablecloth in a delivery of bedsheets, or deliver 99 bedsheets when you promised 100. Also, if things are getting damaged or going missing you need to know where things are going, and when you need to order replacements.

Of course, bar codes are also in use [2] but in hotels particularly they like the markings to be subtle.

[1] https://www.phs.co.uk/our-services/managed-workwear/locker-s... [2] http://www.giltbrookworkwear.co.uk/operation/laundry-facilit...

That makes a lot of sense! Thanks.

It's also a lot easier to scan a bin of 100 RFID tags than it is to try to line up all of their barcodes :)

Hotel towels, to prevent theft.

How do they prevent theft, exactly?

A customer checks in and is given a towel with a customer specific RFID attached. If at the point the customer checks out and the towel is not in the room, it is assumed to be missing or stolen.

Which is the same as if a non RFID'd towel is missing from the room.

Er, no. Have you been to a hotel? They don't normally give you a single towel for your entire stay. The hotel changes the towels every day. Bulk RFID scanning during laundry lets them keep track of how many towels have gone wandering and individually track how many times specific towels have been laundered, which is probably useful information for managing towel quantities in bulk. I don't think tracking down and identifying individual towel thiefs is generally the idea, though I guess you can detect towels in places they are not meant to be (such as in their suitcases on the way out of the lobby).

This doesn't prevent someone from just taking a pool towel to their room and then putting it in their suitcase.

No idea - the article says "to help with inventory control" which doesn't help matters much.

Engadget had a basic article from a few years ago. I'm not sure how the alarm works as even the distance from the floor to your suitcase might be too far for RFID:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/20/that-hotel-towel-youre-st...

Inventory control does not necessarily have anything to do with theft. "Inventory management" would probably be a better term.

The local Gold's Gym has a theft prevention style detector around the front door which will complain if you try and leave with a towel. The towels themselves have an obvious bump in one corner, about the size of a jellybean.

And they are using NFC for that?

RFID!=NFC

NFC is a specific kind of RFID which uses the ISO 18000-3 band for communication over short distances. There are many other types of RFID, which can have much longer ranges.

Yeah, no one would just cut the label out, right?

It is sewn into the corner of the towel itself, not the label.

More accurately, to detect theft/misplacement (is it theft if I leave it on the beach?)

I think you'd still get charged for it.

Million dollar startup idea: Luggage with a faraday cage built into the lining.

How niche is this product?

Within reason, I think hotels expect a certain level of loss. They are probably not going to want to make a big scene in the lobby as a guest is departing and demand that they return the towel they are taking out.

On the other hand, theft by employees is something they are probably much more concerned about. Before this technology, you have to wonder how many hotel housekeepers had fully furnished their own homes with towels and bed linens at the expense of their employer.

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