Your eco hotel wants to attract their business, but so does every other. Here are some tips for setting your green lodging facility apart from the rest:
1. Create a new green initiative focused specifically on meeting and event planning. Get your green team together for a brainstorming session and design a catchy (but meaningful) new program to lure more eco-conscious meeting planners to your facility. For inspiration, check out Plan.It.Green, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau’s program for offsetting the carbon footprint from meetings and conventions held in its area. You can construct a similar – and still really cool – project on a smaller scale for your green lodging facility.
2. Go paperless. Create mini-websites for each meeting, convention or wedding booked to your property so everyone can interact and stay informed. It’s not hard to do – ask your web guy or gal for guidance in creating a template that you can easily personalize over and over again. You’ll save some trees by communicating electronically with your guests, and your meeting/wedding guests will feel like a million bucks to have their own personalized webpage.
3. Reach out – but not too far! Surveys indicate that people are not traveling too far for meetings, weddings and other events these days, so now is a great time to focus some advertising a little closer to home and perhaps even offer some special deals to “locals” who are based within a certain radius of your green hotel.
4. Make your Reduce, Reuse and Recycle efforts visible. Don’t conceal your recycle bins in a discreet corner! Put them a prominent place so your guests can see them and use them. What’s that you say? Your bins are ugly and they ruin the view? Then order some attractive ones, like these. Or these. Or these! Then, switch your condiments and toiletries from individual packaging to bulk dispensers, and print on both sides of recycled paper using soy ink. Now, publicize how much your recycling numbers have gone up and how much your contributions to the waste stream have gone down, because they most certainly will. Perhaps an environmentally concerned event planner or a bride-to-be will read the newspaper that day and Voila! Another booking!
5. Share the good news. Once you’ve hammered out your new green meeting/convention/wedding initiative, you’ve got to tell the world. To ensure that you deliver the right message to the right audience as quickly and efficiently as possible, get help from a skilled hospitality marketing guru like this one. The investment you make in a professional marketing plan can pay for itself with just one good booking!
Do you have a tried-and-true idea for generating more meeting, convention, event or wedding business for your green hotel? Drop us a line at info@EcoGreenHotel.com and we may feature it in our newsletter, blog or website!
For more information visit: www.EcoGreenHotel.com
If Hotels really want to get serious about the environment and saving money they should add Bathroom Bidet Sprayers to all their rooms. Available at http://www.bathroomsprayers.com with these they will hardly need to buy toilet paper anymore, the guest can use a towel to dry off. It's cheap and can be installed without a plumber; it runs off the same water line to your toilet. They'll probably pay for it in a few months of toilet paper savings. After using one of these their customers won't know how they lasted all those years with wadded up handfuls of toilet paper. Now we're talking green and helping the environment without any pain. Blog; http://www.ecogreenhotel.com/blog/?p=153
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