Hotel greening

Every now and again I read something that makes my head spin off into the Stratosphere of Disgust. Just today this happenened when reading the Environmental Leader’s article about the greening — or rather, the hesitation in greening — hotels in the U.S.

The article features Brian McGuinness, a vice president of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and discusses Starwood’s green initiatives as well as its new green brand, Element. According to McGuinness, people say they want a green hotel so long as they don’t sacrifice anything. Fair enough, many people say this about plenty of aspects of their lives. However, McGuiness goes on to discuss to examples where he thinks people will not compromise: master switches and dual flush toilets.

Having spent last year living and traveling in Europe, I can tell you that neither of these compromised my comfort in any way. For those who don’t know what a master switch is, it is simply a slot near the door of your hotel room where you place your key when you enter your room. This turns the electricity on in the room, and you can then turn on the lights, television, etc. at your leisure. When you leave the room and take your key out of the slot, anything that you left on will shut off after a brief interval. (When you return and put your key back in the slot, any lights you left on will illuminate instantly.)

McGuiness said that Starwood (and Element) doesn’t use master switches because some customers were concerned that their rooms would be too hot if the air conditioning was turned off in their absence. He said that Starwood was considering compromise switches instead, so that lights would be turned off, but the AC could remain on. What a colossal waste! And, I might mention, this is based on a customer concern, not a real customer experience. I have never had a problem with the AC being off while I was out of the room, and this includes staying in Athens, Greece, in JULY, in temperatures well over 100 degrees. Hotel rooms are not so large that a few minutes of cooling doesn’t take care of the heat rather quickly.

In fact, the only downside I experienced with a master switch was if I was trying to charge something while out of the room, such as a laptop, digital camera battery, or cell phone. Some hotels did have an outlet set aside for this purpose however.

As for dual flush toilets, these basically have two buttons on the top of the tank, one large and one small. You would use the large button the flush solid waste, and the small button to flush liquid waste. Like master switches, dual flush toilets are also used widely in Europe, but seldom seen here. McGuiness again cited customer “concern” on this topic, the concern being that these toilets wouldn’t work as well. I can attest here that they work just fine.

It seems to me that Starwood is being a bit overly zealous in gathering customer feedback, almost setting themselves up with reasons to NOT be green. Certainly it behooves any business to find out what their customers’ wants and needs are before making a big change, but in the case of master swtiches and dual flush toilets it would appear that the concerned customers just don’t know enough about them, and their concerns are therefore unfounded.

If a hotel didn’t make a big fanfare about master switches and dual flush toilets, customers would simply use them during their stay and that would be the end of it.

A Deloitte survey recently found that 34% of business travelers seek out green lodgings. Starwood properties are incredibly comfortable for business travelers; I hope they do more to meet this desire for green lodging by instituting changes that make sense.

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