Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

Well the family vacation is over and of course, I need to start planning another one.  I am thinking of a beach vacation this winter that is eco-friendly and offers some soothing sun rays and great food.  Here are four of my top choices based on reviews (some from UpTake) and each resort’s website:

1. Villa Montana, Caribbean–I have never been to the Caribbean and the web site looks enticing.  I like smaller resorts with a personal vibe about them.  This looks like it can do the trick.

2. Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort, Fiji– Anything with the Cousteau name must be nice to the environment. Plus, just the name “Fiji” sounds exotic, distant and offers the possibility of a real getaway to me.This is a five star resort offering luxury accommodations.  I can only dream, but it sounds wonderful. It was also given the Australasia Leading Green Hotel award by World Travel. Luxe and green–don’t you love it already.

3. Amelia Island Plantation, Amelia Island, Florida–A golf course that co habits with marshlands and savannahs.  I never thought it possible to do that and keep those greens, well green.  Amelia Island has achieved this and offers world class golf.

4. Barton Creek Resort & Spa, Austin, Texas–a golf course and an Audubon sanctuary, gives new meaning to the term ‘birdie.’  Plus, the reviews from UpTake were all positive and that does not always happen, does it?

I think after this short bit of research that eco-friendly lodging can be found at the more expensive end of the pricing spectrum.  Next time, I will be looking for lodging in the $50 to $100 range.  Can cheap also be green? And offer the niceties I look for when I travel?  We will see, till next week.

My family and I are traveling to Washington, D.C and may take that well known side trip to Monticello.  I heard it is a 2.5 hour drive and if we decide to take the trip, I wanted to spend only one night in the area, make it eco-friendly and keep the budget below $200 a night.  I was surprised at the bountiful results, first I found this site, Virginia.org with a go green logo that presented many options.

Searching a bit further, I found just the thing,  Montfair Resort Farm.  It offers air conditioned cabins, hiking and fishing on over a hundred acres, plus it has all sorts of credentials attesting to its eco-friendly stature.  And I thought it would be hard.  Nope, it wasn’t.

Speaking of green, while I rest by their lake, I will be reading a good book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  With measured prose and a persuasive manner, she has convinced me to compost, only buy organic and plant my own vegetable garden next spring. She is presents hard facts in a light-hearted manner and  despite the heaviness of the subject matter, very readable.  I feel better already.  Virginia is green and I am too (almost).

Keep Tahoe Blue! This ubiquitous sticker shows Tahoe’s green pride and the need to protect this environmentally sensitive area. The classic Northern California combination of a forest-ringed lake with frosty white slopes invites green travel activities such camping, hiking, and alpine skiing.

For eco-conscious winter-sports, I suggest you check out Sugar Bowl, the first ski resort to utilize 100% green power in their operations and with some beautiful back bowls. The secluded acreage of Granlibakken Resort will appeal to some, while others will prefer to be closer to the action at the Embassy Suites Lake Tahoe, which participates in

In the summer, kayak along the 72-mile Lake Tahoe Water Trail, or enjoy a naturalist-led tour of the Lake Tahoe Basin. If you like to mountain bike ride, I suggest the Flume trail for a terrific view of the lake or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride for a wildly technical ride. If you are just visiting, rent a bike on Thursday and participate in the Pedal There program–a biking program designed to decrease traffic in Tahoe City.

Happy Holidays to all.

Just wanted to check in and post a link related to a discussion we’ve been having on this blog the last week or so.  The folks at MarketingProfs had a very interesting post recently about how hotels play on travelers’ emotions through environmental messaging rather than really doing the most they can to decrease their environmental footprint.

Well, as you know, we’ve tried to get beyond the marketing messages and get a better idea of concrete actions that both Hilton and Marriott have taken.  We declared Marriott the winner.

First of all, I completely agree with MarketingProfs’ assessment of where the “green consumerist” movement is right now.  There is a lot of marketing to play on people’s emotional response to environmental issues, but not enough substance, regulation, or knowledge of how to implement effective environmental change in products and services.  (That’s note to say that the knowledge isn’t out there — it is, in many respects.)

Secondly, this gets at exactly what we’re trying to do with Simple Green Choices.  We want to take the traveler’s emotion OUT of the equation and look at what travelers can do by making the proper choices and taking actions that lessen their environmental impact.

Reusing towels is a nice first action–it saves energy, water, and money on the hotel’s bottom line, but it’s a drop in the bucket.  Let’s all be honest–with ourselves and with our customers.

The question at hand is: if I’m an environmentally conscious traveler, should I stay at a Hilton or a Marriott? Just to remind you that the idea here is that as a traveler, you wield an considerable amount of power with your wallet, so how should you use that power if you want to choose based on environmental issues?

(Before I get into the meat of this post, let me offer a disclaimer. I cannot possibly know all of the environmental initiatives and programs going on at each hotel. I also cannot measure what the hotels’ baselines are in terms of energy use, water use, pollution, etc. I cannot tell you whether one hotel has followed through on their environmental initiatives and the other hasn’t. I wish all that data were available at my fingertips, but it’s not. Until we have a lodging certification system that allows for consistent audits across all properties, we’ll never be able to measure hotels accurately against one another.

Well, you might ask: what do you know? What I know is what Hilton and Marriott have published on their website–their public commitments to environmental values and programs. I have to take them at their word that they are executing these programs, and I have to assume that we, the public, will hold them accountable. I would suggest that if you stay in a Marriott or a Hilton, ask about these programs and what the location you’re staying in has done with regard to them.

And please check out Hilton and Marriott’s webpages on environmental programs and stewardship on your own. See if you agree with my judgment.

Hilton
So, what is Hilton doing? Here is a boiled-down list of their main environmental initiatives.

• Nearly every Hilton hotel (including Hilton, Hilton Garden, DoubleTree, Hampton Inn, and Homewood Suites) participates in the “Green Program”–which means that guests are given the option of reusing towels. Apparently, this program saves 12 million gallons of fresh water annually.
• Hilton says that it implemented a “corporate-wide” initiative to retrofit rooms with CFL lightbulbs - reducing room wattage from 750 to 220 Watts. It’s unclear, though, how many rooms have been retrofitted, though, and from the numbers, it’s obvious that it does not incorporate every hotel–or even nearly that number.
• Hilton seems to have explored how an individual hotel’s recycling program could work and printed their findings in corporate manuals, but there is no mandate for any hotel manager to implement this program. Also, they are currently EXAMINING in-room recycling options (no action yet on the corporate level).
• The hotel chain has instituted HER (Hilton Environmental Reporting) system, which seems to be a piece of software that allows managers to benchmark their environmental performance and report to corporate. This system was instituted in 2004 and none of the information has been made public in any comprehensive way.
• In the UK and Ireland, Hilton Hotels get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources.
• In the UK and Ireland, Hilton initiated a 15,000-person strong task force to tackle environmental issues, which they say led to 780 specific actions. Unfortunately, none of these actions are named.
• In September 2003, 400 Hilton hotels across the world participated in Environmental Action Month, where each of the local branches did something to ameliorate its environmental impact, and they published examples on their website.
• In November, Hilton Garden Hotels (a subset of Hiltons) announced that they would be phasing out use of styrofoam cups in favor of paper and corn based “ecotainers.” They’re compostable, which begs the question: has Hilton instituted a composting program?
• Way back in the late 1990s, Hilton conducted an energy reduction program in 14 of their European hotels and since then “several more hotels were given the go-ahead for audit and improvement programmes.”

Bottom Line: In North America, Hilton’s main approach has been to allow individual properties and managers to take action on environmental issues if they so choose. It’s nice that they reuse linens and save freshwater, but there’s a lot more that can be done. The UK and Europe seem to be taking more action, but on the whole, count me unimpressed.

Marriott
What is Marriott doing about the environment? We saw earlier in the week that they have a high opinion of their efforts thus far, while also acknowledging there is a lot left to do:

• They have a BUZZWORD! ECHO (Environmentally Conscious Hospitality Operators) is the name they’ve given to their green initiatives.
• Headquarters Initiatives: they’ve replaced plastic utensils with spudware, given premium parking spaces to hybrid drivers, and made reusable mugs available. This feels pretty week.
• Their energy- and water-efficient laundry facility in Washington D.C. serves six locations and saves 3.5 million gallons of water annually just on its own! (Compared to 12 million gallons for Hilton’s whole towel reuse program.)
• They’re building the first LEED-certified hotel in Baltimore, a Fairfield Inn that will open in 2009. They built the chain’s first LEED-certified hotel in Adelphi, Maryland.
• The company has led a whole smorgasbord of energy- and resource-saving initiatives, including: replacing 4,500 outdoor signs with LED displays, replacing 450,000 light-bulbs with CFLs in 2006, saving 11-17 percent on their water usage through linen reuse programs, and installing 400,000 low-flow shower heads (which each save 10% on hot water use per year)
• 96% of Marriott’s hotels recycle in some form. Of course, there’s no quantification here, but it’s an area they say they’re working on. We’ll see.
• Most impressively, Marriott is a member of the EPA’s Climate Leaders program, and they’ve committed to reducing their energy use 6% per guest room in the period from 2005 to 2010. This is a modest but quantifiable step toward reducing energy use.
• Marriott has received more EnergySTAR labels than any other company (160) and for this, won the EPA’s 2007 Energy Star “Sustained Excellence” award.

Bottom Line: Many of Marriott’s environmental initiatives also rely on the actions of local property managers. However, Marriott has created incentive systems to award and highlight managers for their environmental iniatives. And on a corporate level, they are taking MEASURABLE steps toward reducing their energy and water use. Next step: waste reduction. We’ll see how they do there.

The winnner is… MARRIOTT

The result here isn’t in doubt. If you want to make the Hilton/Marriott decision based on environmental factors, choose Marriott. Based on the information available, there is no doubt in my mind that Marriott has more active and committed programs to reduce their environmental impact. They’ve also worked to earn many more EPA endorsements for their efforts than Hilton. To be frank, though, I’d like to see both of these chains take a more integrated approach to their environmental impact.

Have you had an experience at a Marriott or Hilton that you’d like to share? Please comment or send us an e-mail at simplegreenchoices@gmail.com.

Last month, Travel + Leisure ran a story on its Top 15 green hotels in the world and the associated press release was picked up by a number of sources including USA Today. The list was assembled by the magazine in collaboration with Conservation International, which is dedicated to environmental preservation and issues of sustainability. Current benchmarks for the hotel industry developing a level of sustainability involve their disposal of waste, reduction of water and energy use, and improving how the businesses interact with the local community.

The list is geographically broad, drawing hotels from a wide variety of regions and five continents. What isn’t quite as varied is the level of comfort and cost–which is certainly in keeping with Travel & Leisure’s target demographic. Three of the first five hotels listed have nightly rates that start at $700 and go up from there!

I can imagine how an average reader who saw this story in USA Today or Travel & Leisure might be alarmed to find the best green hotels in the world are ones that are well beyond the means of many eco-conscious travelers. Are “green services” in the hotel industry becoming just another luxury item hotels charge massive premiums for? I don’t have the answer, because the industry is just now starting to get mobilized on its environmental initiatives.

Tune back into this space over the next week and coming months. We’ll look at what the major hotel chains are doing in terms of green initiatives, and I will be going on a site visit later in the winter to the LEED Platinum certified new boutique hotel in San Francisco, The Orchard to see first hand what this is all about.