Having an eco-friendly policy is
becoming more and more an important criterion for a business traveller to
choose an hotel instead of another. Indeed, according to a 2008 survey, 95% of
respondents said that they expected the hospitality industry to take green
initiatives and 38% had gathered information to determine if a hotel was green
or not. More recently, 42% of business travellers asserted that practices like
recycling and energy efficiency were important to them when choosing where to
stay. And this figure is getting higher every year.
What
impact does it have concretely ?
Well
according to Diedrichs of
Green Traveler Guides, “ hoteliers are seeing that going green can give them a
marketing edge among business travellers ”. And as a result, they set up new
practices, like for instance not changing towels or bed sheets every day. But
this is not enough though; those practices are indeed too restrictive.
A new step for the hotel industry
will be to develop a broader approach of environmental impact of each hotel. We
can imagine several paths to go in that direction.
A first interesting strategy would
be to give more information to the customer regarding what is done in the hotel
and how he can participate to that effort. In that perspective, in some hotels
(like the Anantara Bophut Resort in Bophut, Thailand), guests are invited to
join programs offered by the hotel to improve the social and environmental awareness
of local problems.
Another option is to link
sustainability and health consciousness, and thus to include organic food and
beverages offerings. It will satisfy the guests’ will to take care of
themselves and of the world.
Still a lot needs to be done. There
are indeed many customers who complain that they cannot act as green as they
would like to. How is this possible? It might be because some hotels are not
yet ready to give up practices that are associated with luxury (like having
fresh towels every day). But the more demand for green hospitality there will
be, and the higher the voice of guests who are in favor of eco-friendly hotels,
the sooner the change will happen.
