Hotel duvet and pillow sets: What to standardise across rooms (and what to customise)
Bedding preferences are highly personal, so choosing the perfect hotel quality duvet and pillows for your guests can feel like a daunting task.
If you have multiple properties across your portfolio, establishing some level of standardisation can be beneficial, but equally, you might not want a totally uniform look and feel across all your rooms and locations.
Here, we share our tips and advice around what to standardise, and where it can pay to mix it up a bit.
Why should hotel duvets and pillows be standardised?
Standardising bedding across your rooms and properties brings guest and business benefits, including:
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Guest satisfaction - Consistent specifications deliver a consistent guest experience. Guests know what to expect and can book with confidence.
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Loyalty - Brand buy-in and repeat custom is lucrative. A CBRE study shows hotel loyalty programmes now drive 52.8% of all occupied room nights and generate up to 60% of total revenue for major hotel chains.
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Upholding brand standards and identity - Guests will come to associate your brand with the experience you provide, be it budget friendly comfort or premium luxury. This consistency is key to reinforcing your unique offering and market positioning.
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Stock management and laundry - Using the same bedding simplifies laundry for staff, helping establish consistent, repeatable processes for all products across your inventory. It also makes bedding interchangeable across rooms and replacements much simpler.
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Economies of scale - If you’re buying products in bulk, your supplier should offer a volume discount, making your upgrade more cost-effective.
Standardising hotel bedding: key considerations
When it comes to choosing the right hotel pillows and duvets, consider:
Fill
Will your guests expect a luxury natural filling or prefer synthetic materials? While fillings like feather and down are usually associated with a more premium experience, synthetic material technologies are constantly evolving and increasingly rivaling their natural counterparts.
Quality hypoallergenic synthetic materials cater for a wide audience, including vegans and those with allergies. You could also consider a recycled filling to demonstrate your environmental commitments.
Cover material
Covers usually range from soft cotton, at the more luxurious end of the scale, to microfibre and polycotton - perfect for smaller budgets without compromising quality. If you’re opting for a natural fill, make sure your chosen duvet has a cotton cover to prevent feathers poking through the surface.
Tog (duvets)
A 10.5 tog duvet is a medium weight, year-round option. Layer it with cosy throws so guests can add more warmth if they wish.
Alternatively, you could consider opting for a lower tog for the warmer months (around 4.5) and higher tog for the colder, winter months (around 12-13.5). While seasonal variation means buying twice the amount of duvets, the circulation generally results in less wear and tear, reducing the number and frequency of duvet replacements.
Still unsure of your duvet decision? Take a look at our Hotel Manager’s Guide to Choosing the Perfect Duvet.
Weight (pillows)
When shopping for the perfect pillow, pay attention to weight. Hotel pillows normally range from 400g to 1700g - the heavier the weight, the firmer it is.
To cater for the masses, you could provide mid-weight pillows, or consider providing each guest with one firm and one soft so they can order them on the bed how they prefer, or opt for one or the other.
If you’re a luxury brand, guests may expect a pillow menu with a wider variety of options. Provide a quality standard option, and if you can, keep several alternative options in stock so you can cater to different preferences and specific requests.
Need more help navigating pillow purchases? Find our guide to choosing the right hotel pillows here.
What to customise
Standardisation is key to establishing a good baseline offering. Once you’ve selected and rolled out your hotel pillows and duvet choices, consider how you’re going to add some personality or differentiation to your rooms.
You could experiment with blankets and cushions to add some different colours and textures. Introduce a few different colour schemes to add some variation between rooms, or keep it uniform and widely-recognisable, like the Premier Inn’s purple.
If you have hotels across multiple countries or cities, you could get a bit more creative and introduce decor or bespoke touches related to the location. Hotel Indigo is one brand that does this well.
Creating experiences that keep guests coming back
Standardising bedding while reaching the right balance between durability, comfort and cost can feel tricky. Take a look at our brochure for more information, or if you need some guidance, our expert team is on hand to help - get in touch.