By Pablo Lucchesi, CEO, Crown Linen
When hotel leaders think about hurricane preparedness, the conversation typically centers on guest safety, evacuation procedures, staffing, backup power and property protection. While these priorities are absolutely essential, laundry is an operational function that is often forgotten and quickly becomes critical during a disaster.
Clean linens are fundamental to maintaining hotel occupancy, supporting emergency personnel, housing displaced residents and delivering the level of cleanliness and comfort guests expect, even under extraordinary circumstances.
After serving hotel and resorts through Florida and Georgia for more than two decades, I’ve seen firsthand that hurricane preparedness is not just about weathering the storm itself, but also about maintaining operation continuity before, during and after the event. One of the most overlooked components of that continuity is having a resilient linen strategy.
Hurricane Irma: A Lesson in Operational Resilience
The 2017 hurricane season remains one of the most challenging in recent memory. Hurricane Irma caused widespread power outages throughout Florida, disrupting businesses for weeks. For Crown Linen, only two of five processing facilities retained power following the storm. Under normal circumstances, that level of disruption would have significantly affected service. Instead, every hotel customer continued receiving clean linens with inventory turned within 24 hours. How? Not through luck, rather because of contingency planning established long before the storm appeared on the radar.
To accomplish this, hotels temporarily adjusted their linen usage, prioritizing only essential room items rather than replacing every piece of linen after each day per guest. Production was shifted between operating facilities, transportation routes were adjusted, workloads were redistributed and communication with hotel partners remained constant as conditions changed. Crown Linen has strategically placed facilities throughout Florida and Georgia to ensure at least one facility outside of the hurricane’s cone of impact, allowing us to seamlessly service customers despite impeding storms. At the same time, many hotels were accommodating traditional guests as well as evacuees, first responders, utility crews and contractors helping communities recover.
Those experiences reinforced five important lessons, including that disaster preparedness is rarely about one organization succeeding alone and instead depends on coordinated partnerships.
Next week, in Part 2 of Disaster Preparedness Tips From a Laundry Leader, Pablo Lucchesi, a founding partner and CEO at Crown Linen, LLC, will share the five lessons he learned which can help you steer your facility successfully through a disaster.
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About the Author: Pablo Lucchesi is one of the founding partners at Crown Linen, LLC, and has served as CEO since its foundation in 2003. With over 20 years of industry experience, Lucchesi and his team at Crown Linen continue to set the standard for excellence in hospitality laundry services. Lucchesi graduated as a CPA from Universidad National de Cuyo in Argentina. He then earned his master’s degree in business administration at EcoleNationale des Ponts et Chausses in France, as well as a master’s degree in strategic marketing from Cranfield University in the United Kingdom. Today, Crown Linen operates six state-of-the-art commercial laundry facilities and employs over 1,000 associates while servicing over 65,000 hotel rooms.
