For the 2015 holiday season, Carmen Ng, corporate director of sustainability at Langham Hospitality Group, asked all Langham hotels around the world to create completely sustainable Christmas trees. No element of the trees could be store-bought, and all of the trees are on display for the holiday season at Langham properties.
The question "Do guests want green hotels?" is provocative. Most people would respond with "Yes, of course!" But do they also accept that it takes longer to cool or heat the room because there is a concrete core heating/cooling system, which reacts only slowly? This is just one of many examples.
First impression is the last impression as they say. When a guest enters the hotel for the first time, it’s the lighting that gives him the “feel of the place”. Of all the elements in a hotel, lighting has the greatest potential if a hotelier wants to accentuate architecture and decor. Pleasant ambience, unique decor and design, appealing lighting setup are the ingredients of good servicing to mesmerize the guests. There are immense creative possibilities to design an appealing and dynamic ambience through lighting to achieve that extra edge to attract the guests.
Hotels are invested in sustainability, both from a monetary and ideological standpoint. But as more money is spent each year on "going green," how can hotels see the return on their investment? At this year's HX: The Hotel Experience event in New York (previously the International Hotel, Motel & Restaurant Show), a panel addressed the shifting interests of travelers and how sustainability factors into their decision making.
Imagine a golf course with acres of an unproductive turfgrass monoculture traded for fertile farmlands yielding fruits and vegetables, a course that is fully organic, where hundreds of grazing sheep help the lawnmowers and where water recycled though wetlands is reused for irrigation. In December 2015, Belle Mont Farm on Kittitian Hill, a new sustainable luxury destination on the island of St. Kitts, will transform the golf experience with the launch of Irie Fields, the world’s first Golf Environment Organization (GEO) Certified Development, and only fully organic, edible golf course in the world.
Hoteliers increasingly are investing in comprehensive sustainability initiatives that benefit both the planet and bottom line, taking new strategies for water and energy usage, food and supplies sourcing, green construction and waste management all into account. Besides just being positive PR, operators find the considerable savings clearly justify the expenditure. - See more at: http://www.hotelsmag.com/Industry/News/Details/62146#sthash.oMX8FnUr.dpuf
Marriott International has released its 2015 Sustainability Report and is making gains across all sectors of the corporate responsibility agenda, including in its community and diversity programmes. Marriott has 140 LEED Registered and LEED Certified properties and earned over 1600 TripAdvisor GreenLeader badges. Their energy intensity is down 9.4% against a 2007 baseline, with greenhouse gas emissions down 10% and they’ve exceeded their 20% water reduction goal with intensity down 22.9%.
Hotels and motels in New York may no longer offer smoking rooms if a bill proposed by state lawmaker Ken Zebrowski passes. The measure, which was introduced last week, was brought about by Zebrowski's personal experience.
Going green may be a hot trend in the hospitality industry, but hotels that earn environmental certificates do not have an advantage when it comes to attracting guests. The finding comes from a study published recently by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research. The study compared booking revenue at 3,000 eco-certified hotels with 6,000 other properties in North America. Environmental certificates include the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, or LEED, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Dan Condon believes in recycling. Just not when it comes to his hotel towels. Condon composts when he's at home in Boulder, Colorado. He eats local, organic and fair-trade food and drives a Honda CR-Z hybrid sports car. You might call him green. Except he's not so green when he travels for his work at an education nonprofit and stays in a hotel, which happens about 10 weeks per year. There, he uses a new towel every day. And don't try to bribe him with a drink or dessert coupon to get him to reuse the same one.
It goes without saying that the travel industry contributes to a significant amount of waste and pollution. While many travellers do care about the environment, few are willing to curtail their holidays completely, because the proposed experience is too compelling or the alternatives are too difficult and/or expensive. Yet, even the most cynical of luxury travellers are aware of the need to go green.
A hotel stay might have once been thought of as an opportunity to overindulge on rich buffet food, multiple luxuriant baths and mini-bar nightcaps, but is the modern business traveller more likely to demand gluten-free breakfasts, in-room yoga mats and a green-energy policy? Properties have been responding to consumer demand as they adapt to becoming the venues in which environmentally aware, health conscious people want to stay, eat, play, exercise and relax.
The Palazzo Hotel and Casino boasts many features of Las Vegas excess — an indoor waterfall, a smoke-filled gaming area, seven decorative fountains, and guest suites with three TVs and power-controlled curtains. Yet the 50-story complex achieved an unlikely and lucrative milestone after opening in 2008. A powerful private organization declared it an environmentally friendly "green" building, the world's largest at the time. The designation won its owner, Las Vegas Sands Corp., a $27 million tax break over 10 years because a Nevada law puts the private interest group — not the government — in charge of deciding which buildings are green enough for a taxpayer subsidy.
If you want to shrink your carbon footprint when you check into a hotel, you may be better off staying at a mid-range or budget chain hotel. That's the conclusion from a report released last week by Vermont-based Brighter Planet, the eco-minded tech firm that creates digital apps and other technology to measure environmental impacts. The report said the nation’s hotels use 4% of all commercial building energy per year and generate 34.7 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
I have a confession, says ITP Business group editor Louise Oakley . Every year, Hotelier investigates the trends in the development of sustainable hotels in the Middle East, and every year, I approach the task with a degree of scepticism. When the phrase ‘green hotels’ looms closer on the editorial calendar, I brace myself for the usual barrage of beach clean-ups, new shower installations, LED retrofits and the ubiquitous Earth Hour ‘achievements’
At a small, casual, cordial luncheon in New York, the topic of discussion was creating sustainable luxury travel that enrich not only the traveler’s experience, but the destination itself. Attendees included a noble prize winning economist, a world renowned chef and restaurateur, and the head of an international preservationist organization. But they were not the guests of honor.
Want to sleep a little better at night? Make a $10 contribution to the Los Angeles Mission and receive a $20 discount off a night at one of four Joie de Vivre hotels in Southern California. The hotel group has partnered with a website called HealLA that rewards donors with discounts and updates them on how their gifts have made a difference.
Guests at hotels have grown accustomed to reading bath and bedroom cards asking to save the planet by reusing towels, save water by showering with a friend, and to save trees by using emails instead of printing press releases. Hotel Meeting Coordinators offer pens, pads and plates made from recycled materials, and offset their carbon footprints by donating to organizations in remote parts of the world. All these attempts by hotel management appear to put guests on notice that they are good corporate citizens concerned with protecting the environment.
An environmentally conscious client wants to book a room in a 600-room "eco-golf" resort in the middle of a rain forest. It makes claims about being a "green," Earth-friendly resort, but is it really? Since consumer awareness about climate change spiked about four years ago, questions about eco-standards have nagged the industry. Is a resort taking meaningful steps toward sustainability practices, or is it simply "greenwashing," perhaps declaring itself environmentally sensitive because it has installed energy-saving light bulbs?
A Christmas tree which has been decked out with US$11 million U.S. (euro14.3 million) worth of gold and precious stones, stands at the lobby of the Emirates Palace hotel, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday Dec. 16, 2010. The hotel's general manager, Hans Olbertz, was quoted in local newspapers Thursday as saying the 43-foot (13-meter) faux fir has 131 ornaments that include gold and precious stones including diamonds and sapphires. The US$11 million symbol of the season has become the latest extravagance at the Emirates Palace hotel, which boasts its own marina, heliport and a vending machine that pops out small gold bars.