Wholesale housekeeping and restroom supplies for hotels
The most expensive gap on a housekeeping cart is a disinfectant that does not carry a norovirus claim. Norovirus is the pathogen that closes hotel floors, and it is unusually hard to kill — hard enough that the EPA keeps a separate product list for it: EPA’s Registered Antimicrobial Products Effective Against Norovirus (feline calicivirus), known as List G. A general quaternary disinfectant that handles bacteria very capably may have no norovirus claim at all. If your cart carries one bottle for everything, this is the case it does not cover.
Bathroom & Rags Supplier puts housekeeping chemicals, terry, microfibre, paper, amenities and liners on one wholesale account for hotels, motels and resorts across Florida. For the room-by-room stocking routine, see our guide to hotel housekeeping supplies in bulk; this page is about what belongs on the purchase order and why.
The norovirus gap in most housekeeping carts
Three practical consequences follow, and all three are purchasing decisions rather than training decisions:
- You need a second product, not a stronger one. Ask your supplier for a product carrying a norovirus claim on its EPA-registered label. If it is not on the label, the claim does not exist, however the sell sheet reads.
- Clean first, then disinfect. Sodium hypochlorite is inactivated by organic soil. CDC guidance is explicit that fecal or vomit material must be removed before the disinfectant goes down — skipping that step wastes the chemical entirely.
- Contact time is not optional. EPA registers a disinfectant against a stated contact time and expects the surface to stay visibly wet for that whole period. On soiled surfaces, published CDC work found roughly four minutes at 5,000 ppm hypochlorite was needed for a four-log reduction of norovirus surrogates. A single wipe pass that dries in twenty seconds has not disinfected anything.
Where bleach is the chosen route, CDC recommends a chlorine solution of 1,000 to 5,000 ppm — about 5 to 25 tablespoons of ordinary 5–8% household bleach per gallon of water. Buy the dilution equipment with the chemical; eyeballing it produces either an ineffective solution or a damaged surface.
The spill kit you buy before you need it
A vomiting guest in a corridor at 11 p.m. is not the moment to discover what is missing. Every property should hold made-up kits on each floor, and they are cheap relative to a closed floor:
- Disposable gloves and a fluid-resistant apron; eye protection where the label calls for it.
- Absorbent material, scoop and scraper, plus a heavy liner for the waste — sizing and mil selection are in our can liner sizing guide.
- Disposable towels for the cleaning pass. This is one job where a reusable cloth is the wrong tool.
- The List G disinfectant or a measured bleach solution, plus something to measure with.
- A sign to close the area for the full contact time.
Keep the kit sealed and audited monthly. Kits that get raided for gloves are the usual failure.
Par levels for a 100-room hotel at 70% occupancy
Seventy occupied rooms a night is about 2,100 room-nights a month. These are starting pars, not forecasts; we tune them against your real reorder history after the first couple of months.
- Toilet tissue: at roughly 0.4 rolls per occupied room-night, about 840 rolls a month — call it nine 96-roll cases. Two-ply standard rolls in guest baths; consider jumbo only in public restrooms.
- Guest amenities: one set per arrival. At an average two-night stay that is around 1,050 arrival sets a month, not 2,100 — a distinction that routinely doubles a first order by mistake.
- Liners: two per room clean (bath and bedroom) is about 4,200 a month, plus public-area and housekeeping-cart liners on top.
- Microfibre cloths: four colour-coded cloths per room — bath, glass, general, toilet — is 280 cloths a day. With laundering turnaround you want roughly 800 to 900 in circulation so no cart is ever waiting on the wash. The laundering economics are in microfiber vs cotton rags.
- Terry: bath sheet, hand towel, face cloth and mat per occupied room, with three full pars in rotation — one in the room, one in the linen room, one in the wash.
- Chemicals: concentrate for bathroom cleaner, glass and floor; ready-to-use only where dilution error is likely. The cost-per-gallon comparison is in concentrated vs ready-to-use cleaning chemicals.
What to stock, by zone
Splitting the order by zone stops the classic hotel failure of running out of one line while over-ordering another:
- Guest rooms: colour-coded microfibre, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, liners, amenities, tissue.
- Public restrooms: jumbo tissue, hand towel, soap and liners on a commercial dispenser standard — the same par logic as any high-traffic washroom, covered in our commercial bathroom checklist and stocked from restroom supplies.
- Breakfast and food service: a food-contact-safe sanitizer, separate cloths, and disposables. Never the guest-room bathroom cleaner.
- Laundry and back of house: detergent, gloves, heavy liners, and a mop system that never crosses between restroom and kitchen.
- Outbreak reserve: spill kits, the List G product, extra disposable towels and gloves. Hold it separately so it is still there when it is needed.
Buying on a wholesale account
Everything above ships by the case or pallet at quote-based wholesale pricing — no public retail prices, no per-unit retail markup. Multi-property groups run one account with consolidated billing and per-property delivery addresses. Send us your room count and average occupancy and we will build the first month’s par with you, then adjust it against real usage. Commercial cleaning supplies covers the wider facility range if you also manage offices or common areas.
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