I was already snapping photos of the signage in the lobby when I was greeted by the Sales Manager at the Delta Vancouver Suites. She was happy to discuss the many green initiatives and practices at the property, and I was eager to learn them. As a conversation with one of the hotel’s managers, this visit was perhaps more informative than my previous night spent as a guest of the Century Plaza.

The last of the in-room plastic water bottles

We started with a tour of guest rooms, which get great natural light and where she explained that the hotel was in the process of phasing out plastic water bottles, newspapers and coffee makers in guest rooms. The water bottles are replaced with filtered tap in reusable bottles, and newspaper and coffee available on request or in the lobby.

Over a tasty lunch I gained some insight into the employee perspective. Continue reading →

With links to so many globally impactful human activities, such as transportation, lodging, foodservice and agriculture, the tourism industry is uniquely positioned to effect a paradigm shift toward this thing called sustainability. Buzzword though it is, sustainability has perhaps too many potential concrete applications to be easily defined in abstract terms. With a certain root sense of lasting or enduring, and more current denotations that are important in a global way, sustainability can be manifested in many real ways through business.

Finding myself motivated by applications of this concept in hospitality businesses, I set upon a mini-quest during the summer, making a series of five visits to hotels that do it well.

In the What’s Different Series, I will recount site visits and room-nights in hotels that have incorporated a commitment to sustainability into their communications and business identities, with the goal of identifying just what’s different? In hotels where I stayed a night, I’ll evaluate what sets the guest experience apart, if anything, from the experience at an “ordinary” hotel. Are there sacrifices? Perks? For the hotels that granted me a conversation and site visit, I’ll cover more about what they actually do differently in operations. What are the policies? How are the employees involved?

With its so many facets, hospitality has the opportunity to set a wide variety of examples of sustainable business. Looking forward and working forward, the questions I’m asked (mostly by myself in rumination), boil down to: what consists of sustainability in hospitality, and how do we get more companies to do it? Continue reading →