There are a few reasons hotels might use white sheets and towels. For one, white is a fairly neutral color that matches many aesthetics. It is also a color that many find projects a sense of cleanliness while making it easy to spot any signs of damage or staining. This allows a business to easily know when it should launder or replace its sheets and towels.
White is also often the default color sheets and towels are sold in. This color is widely accessible, and often, white sheets and towels are available at lower price points because of their availability.
Why Might a Hotel Use White Sheets & Towels?
There are a few reasons a hotel might choose white sheets and towels:
Neutral, Easy-to-Use Color
White is often seen as a neutral color that fits well with many aesthetics. While an exceedingly white-colored space can feel sterile and off-putting, white blends easily with other colors. In many cases, lower-quality white-colored sheets and towels go mostly unnoticed. They serve their purpose and are available for use without adding or detracting much from a room’s intended look and feel.
While hotels can and do sometimes choose other colors for sheets and towels, with some colors potentially contributing more to particular aesthetics, white is a safe choice when a business doesn’t have a particular reason to choose another color. This is especially true if the same sheets and towels might be used in multiple different spaces. In such cases, white’s versatility and neutrality are extra valuable.
Project Cleanliness
As noted earlier, excessive amounts of white can project a sense of off-putting sterility, but used more sparingly or incorporated with pops of color, white can make guests feel a room is clean and well-prepared. While guests don’t want to feel like they’re in a medical facility, they appreciate sensing they’re in a space that has been properly maintained.
Hotels often give rise to hygiene concerns, with the worst offenders attracting significant media attention and painting the public’s perception of certain types of service businesses. White sheets and towels can better show guests their space is clean and their linens are well-laundered and cared for.
This isn’t just a matter of perception. White is a color often used in medical settings for a reason. It makes spotting stains, damage and other similar issues easier. While dark colors hide stains, making it difficult to notice problems, white sheets and towels allow a hotel to quickly notice potential problems during routine inspections and make sure all rooms stay equipped with clean, quality linens. It’s also comparatively easy to keep linens white, a topic we talk about more in this article.
Availability
This often isn’t a major issue, but not all colors are equally available. The more unusual and exotic a color or design choice, the less likely it is that different businesses will offer it. If you choose a unique color, it’s more likely to become unavailable in the future because of a lack of demand. In a business where uniformity can help improve guest perceptions, committing to sheets and towels of unusual colors can pose a risk.
This isn’t an issue with white sheets and towels. White is often the natural resulting color of the processes that produce sheets and towels. Both cotton and wool tend to be white. Even in situations where white may not be a material’s default color, it is such a popular color choice that it is almost always a color hotels prioritize offering.
Occasional Discounts
Additionally, because white sheets and towels often require less processing to achieve their color and are so widely available, they’re usually cheaper in price. Because of the scaling of production to accommodate the bigger demand for white linens and generally shorter chain to move white linens from the materials stage to the final product stage, businesses can often produce white linens more cheaply than otherwise identical linens.
Even if production costs aren’t much cheaper for white linens than other linens, some businesses pass these savings on to customers. At the very least, white sheets and towels are almost never more expensive than the same sheets and towels in different colors. They will generally be either the same price or a few dollars cheaper. If a business is buying dozens or hundreds of sheets and towels, even a small discount can mean fairly significant savings.
Alsco’s White Sheets & Towels
Hotels can use whatever color sheets and towels they desire, but there’s a reason white is such a popular choice. White linens are easy to source and have advantages over darker colors. They’re even more attractive if they can be found at a lower price than nearly identical dyed sheets and towels.
Regardless of color, if you’d like help sourcing quality sheets and towels for your hotel, check out how Alsco can help. With our linen rental services, we can ensure your hotel always has clean, fresh sheets and towels on hand that are free of stains, rips and other issues. We offer plenty of white-colored options as well as other color choices to suit your needs. Contact us today to learn more.