If you lifted a towel, wash cloth, bath mat, or even a bed sheet from a hotel you recently visited, there is a chance that the police will be knocking at your door very soon.

More and more hotel linens are sporting a patented chip designed to track its whereabouts. I kid you not.

Here is the good news. More than likely the linens you took by mistake (cough, cough) don’t have the tracking gizmo in it. However, in a few years I would bet that every item that is not nailed down in a hotel will contain a radio-frequency identification chip (RFID) that keeps real time inventory of frequently misplaced or stolen goods. That means each item can be traced from the guest room to the laundry, storage, and out-the-door.

I had the pleasure of talking the other day to the guy who started it all, William Serbin. His company, Linen Technology Tracking, is located in Miami. He was in the linen industry for many years and quickly became familiar with the challenges hotels face in monitoring linens. Each month hotels can lose five to 20 percent of towels, sheets and robes. That gets pretty expensive to replace.

When Serbin came up with the monitoring idea he had to make sure the chips were waterproof. Now they are tough enough to go through more than 300 wash cycles. He also admitted that while the trackers have caught a number of towel thieves the real value is just helping the hotel keep track of their inventory.

According to the Linen Technology website, “The entire system is designed around using RFID technology to identify linen within a facility. The RFID technology component consists of a microchip that has an ID and RFID reader and antenna that can receive the ID as a radio signal from the chip to identify it. Linentracker is fully FCC compliant.

“The information can be accessed by hotel management by running various reports through the Linentracker dashboard. As a result, hotel management will gain knowledge of the current loss, age of their inventory, wash counts, up-to-date inventory levels and more. The system works within a self-contained network and does not have to connect to the corporate network for any information.”