Executive Travel : Hotels Check Into Recycling and Other Eco-Friendly Practices

The environmental concerns that soared with the first Earth Day 25 years are now showing up in the hotel room.

And the good news is that business and leisure travelers aren’t paying higher prices because of them. If anything, the trend is saving hotels big bucks.

Guests are finding an array of subtle and overt changes, most requiring only modest cooperation and all designed to ease the impact that hotels--some of them the size of small towns when fully occupied--have on the world outside their walls.

Among the changes:

* Those tiny plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner and lotion are disappearing in some hotels, being replaced by larger refillable containers.

* Guests at some facilities are being asked to use only as many towels and washcloths as they need and to put the used ones in an obvious place so the entire rack does not have to be sent to the laundry each time the room is cleaned. (This policy has been common for years in Europe, even at some exclusive hotels.)

* Some rooms in warm climates have devices that shut off the air conditioning automatically whenever a patio or other outside entrance is opened.

* Guests are sometimes asked to leave newspapers and beverage cans in a separate place in the room rather than toss them in the wastebasket with other trash, so hotel employees can more readily send them to recycling bins.

* At the Willard Inter-Continental in Washington, guests get their laundry back in a reusable basket, not wrapped in throw-away plastic.

There are other changes the guest doesn’t see. For example, Connecticut’s Mystic Hilton sends kitchen scraps and other leftovers to a pig farm. Water-saving shower heads and toilet tanks have been put in many hotels, and some have moved to biodegradable shampoos and soaps. Inter-Continental says each of its 4,995 guest rooms in North America has things such as vegetable-based soaps.

A recent report from the Travel Industry Assn. of America said that 83% of travelers are inclined to support environmentally friendly travel companies and are willing to pay on average 6.2% more for so-called green facilities and services.

But they may not have to pay more.

The Willard hotel estimates that things such as smaller bars of soap and recyclable packaging saved it about $75,000 over an 18-month period.

Tom Riegelman, vice president for engineering at Hyatt Hotels Corp., said the chain’s environmental efforts have saved it money as well.

“We have recycling programs in just about every one of our hotels, and we have had an active energy-conservation program for pretty much the past 10 years,” he said. “Without question the programs have saved us a lot of money. In 1994, energy expense was about 1.4% less than it would have been.”

Riegelman said Hyatt’s energy conservation involves things such as retrofitting lighting fixtures to make them energy-efficient, more efficient heating and cooling, and water recycling.

But “it really has been our experience that making the guest an active part of the conservation programs has been less successful in terms of actually effecting any kind of gains than when we take control of the programs ourselves,” he said.

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The Industry Awakens: By almost any measure, the U.S. hotel industry has emerged from the recession of the last few years and rooms are expected to be harder to come by.

Arthur Andersen Real Estate Services Group says its research indicates that hotel occupancy levels in the United States will be between 67% and 68% in 1995, compared to 62% in 1992.

At the same time, construction of hotels has hit a bit of a plateau. Andersen says that that combination of factors sets the stage for higher room prices. It estimates that the average price will increase by about $5 over 1993.

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Michael Conlon in Chicago writes regularly for Reuters about business travel. He can be reached care of Reuters, Room 1170, 311 S. Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60606, or by Internet electronic mail at mike.conlon@rtrs.com.

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