Green at the Inn : Hotels are learning that being environmentally conscious can be good for business.
The welcome mat in front of some Ventura County hotels has turned green. Environmental consciousness is at work here, not Irishness.
The Hyatt Hotel chain, represented locally by the Westlake Plaza in Westlake Village, ran a color ad--green--in a national newspaper saying “Hyatt announces the world’s first recycling centers that come with a concierge.”
Intrigued, I checked this out with the Plaza’s director of engineering, Rick Creviston. He believes “there are profits to be made by the environmentally conscious business.” His hotel recycles metal and paper through a neighborhood firm, Simi Valley Recycling. Nationally, he said, all Hyatts have such deals with local recyclers and most Hyatts switched in the ‘80s to recycled paper napkins, hand towels, stationery, envelopes and tissues.
Creviston also put in an “energy management computer” to operate the hotel’s air-conditioning, heating and exterior lighting equipment. Switching the appliances and lights off doesn’t completely do the trick environmentally, however, unless you put in energy-saving bulbs, motors and other fixtures. So he contracted with another neighbor, Consolidated Energy Systems in Westlake Village, to help with retrofitting, as it’s called. As a result, this hotel with its 225 rooms will be using almost 150,000 fewer kilowatts each year.
If you figure that a regular home in this country uses 5,000 kilowatts a year, that means Creviston’s effort saves his hotel from paying the equivalent of the electric bill for 30 private homes. It also means that Edison doesn’t have to build extra generating capacity if the county wants to grow a little.
Looking at it another way, Hyatt’s expenditure of about $25,000 in our county--an investment that paid for itself in nine months--means we got cleaner air and less dependence on fossil fuels without having to sacrifice jobs at the hotel or construction of homes.
Locally, Doubletree Hotel, Harbortown, Topper Motel, Motel 6 and La Quinta are also going green, according to Bill Lykins of the Ventura city recycling office.
Doubletree last month won the city’s Waste Watch Award for its recycling efforts. Doubletree General Manager Jerry Tononi conducted a complete “environmental audit,” he said, at his 285-room location and then stationed recycling bins around the place for guests and staff to use.
“The return was immediate,” Tononi said. The city award noted that 46 tons of recyclables were saved.
Tononi devised an inspirational pamphlet to give to guests, explaining recycling at his hotel.
“The guests are pleased and are very responsive,” he said.
Many hotels are pursuing this kind of program. The trade journal Hotel and Motel Management editorialized last fall: “Concern for the environment is no passing fad. New laws will see to it that it may not be long before hotel guests care just as much about the presence of recycling boxes as the thickness of towels.”
The whole travel industry is greening, evidently. Trade journals with names like Travel Agent and Lodging carry articles with headlines like “Get Green; Save Green.” The stories make points such as: “The hotel is a citizen and we’re targeting our hotels to become citizen activists . . . using (their) purchasing clout to encourage change in (their) business partners.”
This is a reference to the new practice of “precycling,” which Travel Agent defined as buying quality durable goods that don’t need to be replaced, buying locally to save energy, buying in bulk to limit packaging, and buying energy-efficient and recycled products.
This kind of thinking has evidently been on the rise for a decade. That’s how long the American Hotel and Motel Assn. has been scouting its membership for hoteliers worthy of the Annual Environmental Quality Achievement Award.
In a related eco-development--namely, the new warnings about the dangers of secondhand smoke--I discovered an interesting hotel-related twist. More and more people are asking for “smoke-free” rooms. That means one that has been deep-cleaned or redecorated to get the smoke smell and particles out so a guest doesn’t have to endure the smell--or, worse, allergies--during an overnight stay.
Creviston and Tononi told me they’ve been converting their hotel rooms at an accelerated rate lately in response to customer demand. Both said they have placed 30% of their room inventory in this category, up from 15% two years ago.
This smoke-free room matter doesn’t go unnoticed by the traveling public. It can make a family decide whether to register or go to another hotel. And even people in charge of convention bookings have noticed that this--and other environment-related hotel characteristics--can swing the choice of one hotel over another.
Lest you think this is just “politically correct” stuff, Business Week noted recently that the landmark Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers--which has taken up the same eco-practices as our local hotelier--lands convention business by being greener than the competition. The headline was, “A Green Hotel May Bring in the Long Green.”
