Top 10 Ways to Help Hotels Go Greener

Kermit and the Jolly Green Giant were clearly ahead of their time. Everybody seems to be going green these days, even hotels.

While I’d like to believe that Mother Nature has finally gotten to the hospitality industry, I cannot help but be cynical about the hotel industry’s collective environmental epiphany. Do they really care about the planet… or about attracting more eco-friendly consumers who, it just so happens, tend to be more upscale and affluent? And as for the little card they leave by the bed suggesting you reuse your towels and forego clean sheets? I’m sure the fact that they stand to save millions of dollars each year on laundry suds by not having to do all that washing anymore has nothing to do with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for trying to protect and preserve our natural resources. I think it’s great that hotels are encouraging their guests to be a little less self-indulgent and more planet-aware. I’m just not buying their motivation behind it.

In the end, I suppose the fact that hotels are pushing more environmentally benign practices is more important than why they are doing it. So, with that in mind, let me offer a few additional suggestions to facilitate the greening of hotels, motels, and inns everywhere:

1. Eliminate your obscene Internet access charges for guests who agree to receive an electronic copy of their bill instead of a loooong paper printout – entire forests will be saved!
2. Give Earth First! free use of your conference centers and lobbies to stage their awareness protests and offer your best corporate rates to the group’s members.
3. Rig your plumbing and lighting so that guests must listen to pre-recorded environmental messages from Al Gore before opening a faucet, flushing the toilet, or turning on a lamp.
4. Replace the tiny liquor and wine bottles in the mini-bars with full-size ones to lessen the burden of all those little plastic containers on community recycling efforts. Of course, the hotel should absorb the cost of the bigger bottles as their way of “paying” the world back for its plastic footprint.
5. Stop offering pay-for-view movies. That only encourages guests to watch television, which in turn causes more electricity consumption and leads to excessive couch-potatoism.
6. Permanently set all your televisions to the Discovery Channel and allow guests free viewings of An Inconvenient Truth.
7. Instead of offering your Jewish customers airline mileage or hotel affinity points, make contributions on their behalf to the Jewish National Fund’s EZ Tree Program.
8. Tell USA Today you are no longer willing to accept free bulk deliveries of the newspaper and stop selling newspapers and magazines in your gift shops. If guests are in need of news, they can get it on the Internet thanks to your free online access. More forests will be saved!
9. Encourage guests to take home your logo emblazoned bathrobes free of charge. Otherwise you will have to wash them repeatedly, thereby undermining your water saving efforts.
10. Offer special discounts to guests who agree to take showers together. This, too, will aid your water conservation efforts.

Who knows? Maybe one day we will witness the spectacle of Paris Hilton accepting a Nobel Prize on behalf of the hotel chain whose name she bears.

Now that’s hot!

5 of 9

• Googling Weak Journalism
• The Irony of the New York Minute
• Out of the City and Into the Woods
• Seeking a Cure for The San Francisco Treat
• Top 10 Ways to Help Hotels Go Greener
• Clearing the San Francisco Air (Part One)
• Clearing the San Francisco Air (Part Two)
• If You Are Going to San Francisco
• A Demonstration We Can Do Without

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