Some hotels really do have cameras in the rooms – in the bathroom even! – but at most hotels you have some measure of privacy behind the guest room door.
Not this guest, they feared, once they discovered that their towels were being tagged and tracked!
The towels in my hotel room are being tracked
byu/Tackit286 inmildlyinteresting
Hotels have been embedding RFID chips in towels for more than a dozen years. And this had led to actual prosecutions for towel theft.
But for the most part, chips are there to run the hotel’s linen inventory like a supply chain. Theft reduction is a side effect. They’re not GPS, they don’t track you, and there isn’t a retail‑style alarm at the front door at most hotels.
Still, telling people that they’ll be tracked deters theft! One hotel in Europe lays out the consequences for stealing towels. You will reported to the government and fined up to 15,000 euros (~ US$17,350).
We inform you that all of our towels are equipped with an invisible localizable chip from the RFDI system. The towels cannot be carried out of your room. In the event that the towels do not remain in the apartment, the company reserves the right to denounce you to the relevant agency with fines from €300.00 to €15,000.00 attentively. THE DIRECTION.
The Nairobi Hilton prosecuted someone for stealing two towels and they received a two year sentence. In the early aughts, IHG promoted ‘towel amnesty day’ but honestly I wouldn’t expect towel theft to be so common in a world of checked bag fees as there was back then, who travels with extra space for towels?
RFID tags are battery free, have a unique ID, and are identifiable when they pass by a nearby reader. It’s like a barcode you can scan in bulk without line‑of‑sight.
They’re rugged for industrial laundry and survive a few hundred wash cycles. Hotels and laundries read carts of towels and sheets at choke points (laundry room doors, loading docks, storerooms) to reconcile what left and came back.
- Properties and off‑site laundries bulk‑scan carts to automate counts, prevent mix‑ups between clients, and track item lifecycle/wash counts. Most loss reduction comes from the laundry as control point (not the guest).
- Each item’s wash count and “age” are tracked so worn pieces can be retired before guests see them.
- The fact that items are tagged is a theft deterrent. But most towel disappearances that are stopped is avoidance of misrouting in the laundry flow, not just guest theft.
It’s theoretically possible to log individual towels to a room, but that’s not generally what’s done. Tracking happens at cart/closet/floor/department level, not paired to a guest. Some systems can associate batches to housekeeping closets or even rooms during distribution using handheld devices but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this done in practice.
And typically hotels don’t have beeping gates that would detect towels going out the door. It would also be possible to place antennas at hotel exits to alert staff that a tagged item was leaving. You can imagine the guest experience consequences of false positives! In any case, the tags are not GPS and there’s no “live tracking” once you’re off property.
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