Tom Otley asks the big chains what they are doing to help the environment.

Tired of being asked to hang up your towels for re-use, when there are no hooks? Sick of finding the TV has been on in your room all day in readiness for your arrival? Flummoxed as to why everything from pots of jam to bottles of shampoo has to be served in individual containers on every dining table and in every room in a hotel?

Armed with self-righteous anger and powered by my own transferred guilt about staying in so many hotels, I’ve been asking the hotels what they are doing to help the environment in these cash-strapped times, and what’s stopping them from doing more. Their answers are many and varied, but first, the good news – current economic conditions are good for the environment.

As John Wallis, global head of marketing and brand strategy for Hyatt Hotels, puts it: “When business is bad, one of the few variable costs you have is energy, so all hotel general managers are trying to figure out how they can reduce energy costs.”

In some instances this is simply a case of turning off lights, but in others it is spending money ultimately to save it – for instance, solar panels on a roof. What’s crucial for all hotel chains, says Wallis, is “how we apply environmental principles on a day-to-day basis at every single property”.

Some brands own their hotels. Paul Flaum is chief operating officer of Premier Inn, which has more than 500 budget properties in the UK. “We’ve just built a green hotel in Tamworth where we can try all the latest science, and we are looking at our existing properties to see what we can do, particularly with utility consumption, water, power and so on,” he says.

Yet for most chains it’s a matter of convincing the owners of each hotel that the initiative is financially viable. Arushi Raval, chief green officer at Starwood Hotels, says: “When we developed our initiatives it was with this economic situation in mind. Many of the projects are expected to make savings for our hotels. Where an initial investment is necessary, we narrowed our focus to those that offered short-term payback.”

It’s a message all brands are keen to emphasise. Andrew Staley, director of property and utilities for Hilton UK and Ireland, says: “Our initiatives have seen large reductions in energy and water consumption – proving that ‘being green’ is also smart for business.”

The hotel chains are also at pains to point out that they have been working on all of this for years. Sarah Rooney, the Rezidor Hotel Group’s responsible business manager, says: “We’ve had our responsible business programme in place since 2001 across all our brands [which include Radisson SAS, Park Inn and Regent]. It deals with environmental, social and ethical issues and last year we began training all 32,000 employees so they could make a difference in their everyday work and lives.” She says this helped Rezidor to triple the number of third-party hotels certified as green-friendly during 2008.

Marriott also claims to be at the forefront of the green agenda. Ed Fuller is president and managing director of Marriott international lodging. “Marriott has been a member of the International Tourism Partnership on environment [ITP] for 15 years and I’ve been chairman for the past six,” he says. “We have committees in every hotel that challenge staff to look around the hotel [to see how green it is]. For example, the exterior lights might be turned off at night but the front lights kept on as it’s part of marketing.” Fuller says a balance has to be found. “The idea is that we’re taking steps internally but we don’t want to get to the point where we issue you a flashlight to enter the hotel.”

So what can hotels do? First, get staff involved. Staley at Hilton says the group has already put more than 30,000 employees through workshops and online “eco-learning” programmes. Hyatt’s Wallis adds: “All of our hotels have a ‘green team’ that meets on a monthly basis. We also have an online green blog where anybody can post a question.”

How can you tell if a property is green? Certification certainly plays its part. From the hotels’ point of view, they want to convince us that the efforts they are making are genuine and effective. For this they need to be certified. Simple? Not really.

“Certifications have been popping up everywhere, many of which are based on locally adopted standards,” says Raval at Starwood. “This presents a problem for the hotel industry when it comes to putting forward its own standards. What do these standards mean in light of certification programmes? The larger question is – are we certain that what is being required translates into a meaningful reduction in environmental impact?”

Certification also has to deal with two issues – how green is the building, and how green is its operation? In general, new buildings are more environmentally friendly. Brian McGuinness, Starwood’s senior vice-president for the group’s new Aloft brand, says: “Aloft is naturally greener because there’s a lot of new products that were not on the market five years ago. That said, we took an additional route – we got rid of the shampoo and conditioner bottles and we use dispensers in the showers.” (See feature, page 40.)

Starwood has also recently launched Element Hotels, an extended-stay brand with a focus on environmentally friendly design. The first opened last year and others are planned in the US for this year, but Raval says the lessons learnt have been rolled out across all of the group’s brands, including Sheraton, Westin and Le Méridien.

“One of the biggest commitments we have made in terms of environmental sustainability is with Element,” she says. “All Element hotels are required to pursue the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] certification. We had the advantage of working with a new-build product – most Element hotels being newly constructed – so it was easier to come up with a standard approach, and that will help the brand to appeal to owner-developers during a tough economic time.”

It’s more difficult when dealing with older properties, but there are still things a chain can do. Fuller at Marriott says: “We have been able to make some changes when renovating buildings such as Grosvenor House in London. We have incorporated what we call the ‘sustainable hotel development steps’, which we’ve taken from the ITP and are now part of our design guides.”

The operation of a hotel is just as important, as is proving it is being run in an environmentally intelligent manner. Hyatt’s Wallis says: “We are lucky because in our full service hotels we don’t have any franchises, so we have access to all the data and we know how much water or energy we are using. But if you are in the full-service franchise game, how do you get the certification? Owners might not have, or release, all that information. Plus, some certifiers won’t certify you for three years.”

Rooney at Rezidor adds: “We chose the most stringent labels in each region as classified by the International Organisation for Standardisation – Nordic Swan in Scandinavia, the Green Tourism Business Scheme in the UK, the Green Key in France and Benelux, the Green Hospitality Award in Ireland, and ISO 14001 in Germany – to ensure our hotels were performing efficiently.”

Certification is also important to Swissotel. Its London hotel, the Howard, gained its ISO global certification last month. Andreas Stys, general manager, says: “Being certified is a good thing as there is a pressure to improve standards each year.”

Stys believes change has to come from within and this does not have to be through giant gestures. He has been asking staff to come up with their own green initiatives and if their ideas are used, they receive £150. A recent suggestion was giving branded reusable cloth bags to all meetings delegates, and the hotel has also stopped importing bottled water.

Staff training is crucial, as Wallis recognises. “The hotel business employs a lot of young people, and the youth of today will not allow a hotel to get away with bad practice. We want to awaken the consciences of our 85,000 employees to see how they can make the world a little better. I’d far rather share with housemaids how conserving water helps, as opposed to saying to them: ‘We’re trying to reduce costs.’ There’s a greater sense of pride. So we are launching a huge training programme that is being rolled out this year across the world.”

So what can guests do to encourage the hotels? One way is to be vocal about what we expect, as good hotels will react to customer expectations. Wallis says: “We are having more people saying, ‘Please don’t change my sheets during my stay’ when they check in.”

Marriott has been running forums with its customers for the past five years. Fuller says: “In Europe a couple of years ago, the commercial customers said: ‘We want you to understand that we expect community and environmental initiatives from the companies we’re going to do business with. If it’s not there, we won’t work with you.’”

Raval concurs that some of the ideas Starwood is implementing “came from corporate customers, who were requesting that certain practices be in place. If the requests were consistent enough, were of environmental benefit and met our economic criteria, then they were incorporated. We also scoured environmental certifications for practices that we felt should be at the heart of every programme,” she adds.

Much remains to be done, however. Wallis at Hyatt points out: “We might be doing a great job in sorting out our rubbish, but when it comes to collection it’s a different matter.” Fuller at Marriott agrees: “It’s execution versus policy. There are certain cities in the US where it’s hard to recycle because there’s nobody there to help you. But we’re holding ourselves accountable. We’ve always done self-auditing, and this year we’re doing outside auditing for the first time.”

All of the brands have big plans for the future. Staley at Hilton says: “In the UK and Ireland, our focus on energy management over the past three years has led to a total saving of more than 45,000 tonnes of CO2. And last year we launched a global sustainability programme across all Hilton hotels that by 2014 aims to reduce energy consumption from direct operations by 20 per cent, reduce CO2 emissions by 20 per cent, cut output of waste by 20 per cent and water consumption by 10 per cent.”