When you’re reserving a hotel room, you’re probably not thinking about
whether your room has a low-flow toilet. Little by little, hotels are
making changes like that to lighten their environmental impact.
Rebecca Williams reports it’s not always easy for travelers to know how
green a hotel is:
Transcript
When you’re reserving a hotel room, you’re probably not thinking about
whether your room has a low-flow toilet. Little by little, hotels are
making changes like that to lighten their environmental impact.
Rebecca Williams reports it’s not always easy for travelers to know how
green a hotel is:
“This is our one washer where we do all our laundry, it’s running 24
hours a day.”
Gail Vantiem manages the front office for this Courtyard Marriott:
“We had 100 checkouts this morning so at least 300 towels need to be
done and put into the rooms today.”
And a lot of those towels could’ve been reused. Most of us might see
those little cards talking about reusing your towels and feel a little
twinge of guilt. But when people stay in a hotel they often take extra
long showers and use a bunch of towels. It feels like vacation.
But cutting back on the laundry load makes a lot of sense for a hotel.
It saves energy, water and of course, money.
Some hotels are trying to do more. They’re trying to find a balance
between giving you a comfortable stay and being more energy and water
conscious without doing anything that will inconvenience their guests.
This Marriott in suburban Detroit is being renovated. Gail Vantiem
says they’ve swapped the traditional lightbulbs for more efficient
compact fluorescents. They’ve installed low flow toilets and
showerheads.
After a guest checks out, the room is cleaned and the heat or air
conditioning and lights are turned off to save energy. Vantiem says
that’s where they’ve had the most public relations work to do:
“The number one complaint is the heat’s not working in the room in the
winter months. It’s just the way you explain to the guest, oh you know
we’re trying to conserve.”
But when it comes down to it, hotels are there to cater to their
guests’ needs. That might mean wanting fresh towels and sheets every
single day. Vantiem says it can be a tough thing for hotel managers to
balance:
“That’s the hospitality business, that’s what we’re here for, if they
don’t want it done we can’t change people’s minds by any means and we
don’t try.”
But some people say hotels can save a lot of money by trying.
Linda Chipperfield is vice president of marketing and outreach for
Green Seal. It’s an independent group that certifies hotels that have
a lighter environmental impact:
“The average hotel purchases more products in one week than 100
families will purchase over a whole year.”
Besides fresh towels and sheets every day, there are all those little
soaps and bottles of shampoo.
Chipperfield says hotels stand to save thousands of dollars each year
by reducing energy and water use. But she says on the whole, the hotel
industry has been slow to change:
“The more pillows there are on the bed, the more towels there are in
the bathroom, the more it’s perceived luxurious, it’s perceived as a
higher quality hotel. It really is a challenge for a hotel to create
different ways to make guests comfortable and portray the image of
luxury but try to save energy at the same time.”
Chipperfield says the key is to do some things that are visible to the
guests – like a towel reuse program. And also do some things that are
under the radar – like installing low-flow toilets that work just as
well as the traditional toilets.
But as a traveler, it’s not easy to know whether a hotel’s really
green, or if it just has a great marketing team. Even some hotels that
are doing a lot aren’t talking about it on their own websites.
Kim Solem is with Expedia. She says travel websites like hers are
struggling with how to rate green hotels. She says there’s no simple
way to judge who’s doing what:
“Right now there are several sets of standards in existence and they
vary by region so it’s pretty difficult for a traveler to understand
just what shade of green a hotel is or to compare one hotel against
another. So our goal is to get to a place where hotels are evaluated
on a standard, very comprehensive point system.”
Solem says she’d like to see a system that grades hotels on a 1 to 100
point scale. And have a little green icon by the ones doing the best
job.
But Solem says that’s at least a couple years off.
In the meantime, if you’re really curious, you can call the hotel
directly. You can ask what they’re doing to cut down on waste, energy
and water. And once you get there, you can hang your towels up for one
more use.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.