Free Environmental Audits Uncover Major Funding Opportunities for U.S. Hotels to Go Green

After decades working in the hospitality industry, I’ve seen many trends come and go. But a few years ago when climate change really started to come into focus and people began talking about ways to create a sustainable hospitality industry, I knew that eco-hospitality was not going to be just another passing fad. It was here to stay, and rightfully so.

And these days, with all the attention being paid to the environmental and economic benefits of cutting energy consumption, it’s a rare hotelier who has not at least considered implementing a sustainability initiative at his or her property. But many never get beyond the wishful thinking stage, because the process can seem so daunting – and expensive.

That’s why I started my company, EcoGreenHotel. We help lodging facilities address sustainability issues and implement environmentally sound initiatives. EcoGreenHotel recently partnered with the great folks at Atlantic Energy Solutions Inc. – a leader in assessing the energy demands and usages of municipal, corporate and industrial complexes – to take the concept a step further.

Together we created an innovative new Environmental Support Program that helps hoteliers design, fund and successfully launch their green initiatives. As part of that program, since May we’ve been offering free on-site environmental audits to all U.S. hotels! So far, over 30 properties from across the country have taken advantage of the offer, and the results have been amazing.

I would like to cite the example of one New York City hotel that is affiliated with a major franchise brand, because it really demonstrates what an in-depth environmental audit can reveal.

This particular hotel had already made progress in its sustainability plan, but like most, it still had room for improvement. Atlantic Energy Solutions’ engineers conducted an in-depth analysis of the property and identified several ways to increase its energy efficiency. The engineers recommended a variety of upgrades, including lighting, in-room thermostats, third-party energy procurement, participation in a demand response program, and energy monitoring software.

And the best news? Our team identified rebates, tax breaks, incentives and savings that will not only pay for those upgrades, but will also produce a positive cash flow for the property from Day One!

The amount of rebates and incentives available to that project was incredible gaining a six figure year one positive cash flow effect. We’ve identified ways to give that hotel an exceptionally rapid return on investment and ongoing energy savings of over $44,000 annually. And as we conduct these audits across the country, we’re uncovering tremendous opportunities for properties of all sizes because we’ve got staff totally dedicated to finding rebates and incentives.

I want to reiterate that the no-obligation assessment is totally free of charge. Atlantic Energy Solutions covers the cost of travel and other expenses for its environmental professionals to conduct the on-site audits, which consist of a thorough evaluation of each property’s electric, gas and water consumption.

Then, based upon the engineer’s findings, the team prepares and submits a free, no-obligation report and proposal to each hotel. The comprehensive report and proposal includes concrete steps the hotel can take to increase its energy efficiency, and includes a cost/benefit breakdown and a list of funding streams for which the property might qualify.

Not only are energy efficiency projects like these great for the environment and a hotel’s bottom line, they also form the basis for an entirely new marketing focus. Sustainable travel is a growing segment that the savvy hotelier would be wise to tap into. Our unique program makes it easier than ever for lodging facilities to quickly and cost-effectively go green.

Environmental audits will only be available free for a limited time. I invite property owners and managers to call me personally at (888)229-0213 Ext.801to schedule their hotel’s free on-site audit.

For more information visit: www.EcoGreenHotel.com

Florida’s Green Lodging Program: Only the good die young…

A few weeks ago in a blog post, I sang the praises of Florida’s outstanding Green Lodging program (FGLP). Established in 2004 by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), FGLP’s small but dedicated staff has helped hundreds of properties statewide implement meaningful green initiatives, and has made their program a model for the country.

That’s why I was so saddened to learn that due to drastic budget cuts, the FGLP as we know it will cease to exist on July 1st. According to a recent article in the Orlando Business Journal, the program’s budget of $337,000 was slashed to $63,000, and three of its four staff positions were eliminated.

You read that correctly – one employee and $63,000 to support the current stable of over 500 designated green properties, in addition to handling hundreds more that have filed their applications and are on the waiting list for FGLP approval.

Beginning July 1, initial site visits to determine compliance with program standards will become a thing of the past. Annual recertification will fall by the wayside, too, as will easily accessible expert advice from live DEP staff.

Instead, there will be occasional webinars, an online application process that will allow a property to assert that it has implemented its green initiative – and be approved – sight unseen, and a watered down renewal process.

FGLP’s official web site optimistically calls the changes “program improvements” and attempts to calm fears that the model project will become nothing more than a rubber stamping mechanism that allows undeserving properties to falsely bill themselves as environmentally responsible. In part, the web site states:

Maintaining environmental excellence in the program is of utmost importance to DEP. While the program will now be administered primarily online, it will not be a self-certification program.

I did not add the bold print in the statement above; DEP did. Publicly declaring that the FGLP will not be a self-certification program sounds brave and decisive, but unfortunately it also sounds like wishful thinking.

The stakes are extremely high for hoteliers in Florida, where approximately half of all the state’s visitors (many of whom are eco-conscious travelers) stay in lodging facilities, and where the Governor has mandated that all state-related conferences and meetings be held in certified green lodges whenever possible.

Yes, there’s big money to be made from earning FGLP’s green certification. Since the program has been so skillfully administered thus far, green certification truly meant something in Florida. The properties that earned it had every reason to be proud, and the ones on the waiting list knew they’d have to tow the line to get certified.

There is now a realistic fear that green lodging designation in Florida will be as easy to come by as a bad sunburn.

I understand that times are hard. Every line item in every state’s budget is on the chopping block, so the gutting of FGLP is not a huge surprise. But it is a huge disappointment, and I sincerely hope that Florida will find a way to restore the program to its previous funding levels – and high standards – post-haste.

Has your city’s or state’s green lodging program also taken a funding hit? Tell us about it at info@ecogreenhotel.com.

About EcoGreenHotel
A valuable resource for green hotels, EcoGreenHotel is dedicated to helping lodging facilities address environmental issues and implement environmentally sound initiatives. The company’s online presence at www.EcoGreenHotel.com offers a marketplace for green hotel products and services and provides a one- stop venue for green hospitality industry news, basic environmental overviews and other tools like green hotel checklists, project ideas, book lists, and valuable links designed to promote a more sustainable hospitality industry.

EcoGreenHotel’s green hotel consulting services guide owners, operators and developers through the journey of developing and/or maintaining a sustainable operation or project.

For more information about EcoGreenHotel, please visit www.EcoGreenHotel.com or send an email me Scott Parisi at sparisi@EcoGreenHotel.com.

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Water, Water Everywhere: Does your green hotel have the stomach for THIS water conservation solution?

Leave it to those wacky kids at NASA to come up with an innovative way to deal with a potential water shortage…

According to a recent Associated Press article, NASA engineers have perfected a method for transforming urine, sweat and exhaled moisture into safe and delicious drinking water.

Cheers!

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were the first to publicly toss back a few shots of the clear liquid, with a video camera as their witness. One astronaut declared, “The taste is great!” before toasting other crew members and their NASA teammates back on Planet Earth, who responded by raising their own cups full of tasty recycled wee.

If you can stop yourself from shuddering and gagging long enough to really think about it, it becomes clear that this is really a big deal for all of us. Imagine if each of us could quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively recycle our own household’s liquid waste – or that of our eco hotel’s guests – and turn it into potable water. Heck, why not?

Because it’s absolutely disgusting, you say?

Listen, the truth is that we already recycle water from our toilets and convert it into drinking water – it just takes a long time to do and the path from toilet to tap is such a convoluted winding road that we lose track of it. This new technology is fast enough to allow six astronauts to make six gallons of drinking water from their urine in just six hours, according to space station lab manager Marybeth Edeen.

The system takes the crew’s combined urine from the toilet and puts it into a tank where the liquid is boiled off. The machine collects the resulting vapor and discards the nasty urine brine. The vapor is combined with water from air condensation and the resulting liquid is filtered repeatedly until it is clean enough to drink.

This technology will have a huge impact on space travel – especially for long term missions such as a manned trip to Mars. And it has great potential here on Earth, too. Edeen pointed out that the same technology was already used to purify water after the Asian tsunami in 2004, and it saved countless lives.

So belly up to the bar, and let’s drink to our good friends at NASA who have developed a water recycling system that will undoubtedly change the world – and possibly, the Universe – for the better!

Have you heard about a new environmentally-friendly technology? Tell us about it by sending a message to info@EcoGreenHotel.com. We may spotlight it on our website, in our newsletter or on this blog!

For more information visit: www.EcoGreenHotel.com

Recession-Proof Eco-Events: Five tips for boosting your green hotel’s meeting, convention and wedding bookings in a tough economy

Competition for meeting, convention, event and wedding bookings is stiff these days. Everyone – from the Fortune 500 company CEO to the young couple down the street who just got engaged – is pinching pennies and looking for the best all-around venue for their events.



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

Great Wolf Resorts – America’s First National Hotel Chain to Have All U.S. Properties Earn Green Seal Certification!

Please take a look at this one minute EcoPodcast about this amazing achievement!!

If you’ve ever been part of the certification process for a green lodge, you know that it takes a lot of dedication and teamwork. Now, can you imagine what it would take to get twelve properties certified? That’s no small accomplishment!

That’s why EcoGreenHotel salutes Great Wolf Resorts, Inc. for the distinction of being the first national hotel chain to earn Green Seal certification for all its U.S. properties. The Madison, Wisconsin company is North America’s largest family of indoor waterpark resorts. Great Wolf spent a year auditing and upgrading all twelve of its facilities to meet Green Seal’s rigorous requirements.

Has it been worth it? Great Wolf thinks so. These resorts are not only decreasing their impact on the environment, but they are also realizing savings and attracting a new guest segment – the eco-tourist. For example, at the Great Wolf Lodge in the Poconos Mountains, Pennsylvania, the company saved nine million gallons of water in one year by changing to low flow plumbing fixtures. Great Wolf is already reporting savings on water and energy costs, and guests are delighted to stay in a resort that places so much emphasis on protecting the environment. It’s a win-win-win situation!

But the company isn’t stopping with Green Seal. It has also launched Project Green Wolf, which will build upon previous efforts by expanding Great Wolf’s water and energy conservation measures, waste minimization, environmentally- and socially-sensitive purchasing practices, and guest education. The guest education component involves a partnership with National Geographic Kids to develop children’s environmental learning programs.

Hats off to Great Wolf Resorts, Inc. – a true pioneer in the green lodging industry!

For more information Visit: www.EcoGreenHotel.com

Intelity’s ICE – the world’s most advanced in-room virtual concierge and back end monitoring system!

Want to offer your guests an impressive and easy way to check out, access valet and room service, and make spa or restaurant reservations, all from a sleek touch screen installed in their guest rooms?

Would you like to be able to track and measure all of your hotel’s activities, modify prices at a moment’s notice, earn some advertising revenue and send real time, property-wide messages to guests and staff – all with the push of a button?

Meet the Interactive Customer Experience Solution, also known as ICE. ICE was developed by Intelity, an interactive hospitality technology company based in Orlando, Florida. Since its launch in late 2008, the system has garnered a lot of attention for its cutting edge tech and ease of use. ICE’s components are provided by Dell, Adobe, Microsoft and standard open-source providers, making it possible for in-house IT staff to handle the system.

In addition to the cool touch screen, guests can access the multi-lingual system from their PDA or laptop. A virtual concierge guides them through a menu of choices. Real time weather, flight and attraction information can also be accessed. Non-invasive advertising can be incorporated, as well as video messages from the company president, general manager, owners, brides and grooms, meeting planners... the options are endless!

ICE provides real time interfacing between property management, food and beverage, valet, event planning, spa or golf – you can link it all. The system routes guest and service requests to appropriate staff through a handheld device, tracks response time and completion and creates graphs and charts for analysis.

For more information about Intelity’s ICE, visit www.intelityice.com or contact Shawn Dagon, Director of Business Development at Intelity, at 407-965-2205 or 407-267-8711.

Florida’s Green Lodging Program: A model green hotel certification program that continues to grow

If you’ve ever been to Florida – especially to ecologically-sensitive areas like the Everglades and the Florida Keys – you know that the state has incredible natural resources. Stunning beaches, unique and abundant wildlife, fertile land, and of course, all that gin clear water make Florida an extraordinary place to live and a fantastic place to visit.



Key Largo Reef: Florida’s green lodges are helping protect the environment and preserve scenes like this for future generations (photo courtesy Monroe County Tourism Development Council)


And boy, do people ever visit! The state’s tourism marketing agency, VISIT FLORIDA, recently estimated that over 82 million people visited Florida in 2008. Since approximately 50% of Florida’s visitors stay in hotels, the lodging industry has a major impact on the state’s sensitive environment.

That’s why Florida’s Green Lodging Program (FGLP) is so important. Established in 2004 by the state Department of Environmental Protection, FGLP has assisted and recognized hundreds of facilities for their sustainability efforts. From huge properties owned by major chains like Hilton and Hyatt, to funky island B&B’s owned by somebody’s mom and pop, designated green lodges are becoming as common in Florida as flip flops, tiki torches and margarita cocktails!

One thing that has made Florida’s Green Lodging Program so successful is the commitment to the environment demonstrated by Governor Charlie Crist. In 2007, Gov. Crist signed an executive order mandating that all state conventions and meetings be held in certified green lodging facilities whenever possible. With the stroke of a pen, Gov. Crist started a stampede of hoteliers scrambling to green up their properties and get them on the list of approved facilities. Close to 500 properties have met the program’s certification requirements, and hundreds more have filed the paperwork and are in the pipeline to receive their green designation.

We at EcoGreenHotel salute Governor Crist, the Florida Green Lodging Program and all the owners, management and staff of the state’s certified green lodges who have worked so hard to protect and preserve the Great State of Florida for the next generation of visitors to enjoy.

Do you know about a green lodging program that deserves kudos, too? Send a message to info@EcoGreenHotel.com and tell us about it. We may feature it in a future edition of our newsletter or on our web site, www.EcoGreenHotel.com!