Guest health and wellness is of prime importance to hoteliers, and one of the most challenging areas is indoor air quality because you can’t see it, feel it, or hear it, and most times you can’t even smell it. It often takes someone getting sick to raise the air quality to everyone’s attention. Indoor air is a difficult topic to get your arms around, no pun intended, and occupant health is a central concern when discussing indoor air quality. Indoor air quality refers to monitoring and reducing indoor air contaminants and providing a place that building occupants can function well without effects from microbial contaminates.

Hiring an experienced furniture refinishing company can help financially and environmentally. By refinishing rooms rather than buying new furniture, hotels can modernize rooms easily while keeping costs to a minimum. Refinishing, reupholstering and repurposing furniture typically achieves a cost savings of between 65 and 92 percent compared to purchasing new furniture. It is a particularly effective way of ensuring rooms meet customers’ expectations—while helping your bottom line. Modern refinishing methods are also environmentally-friendly.

As a hotelier, you are probably benchmarking most aspects of your business. For example, you already track how your average daily rate, occupancy, and RevPAR stack up against those of your competition. Benchmarking your hotel’s energy performance provides the same type of information, helping you to understand facility operations and compare your performance to your competitors while reducing operating costs. Now benchmarking energy performance is even easier, with a number of providers offering tools to automate the process.

As more and more hotels are seeking to implement environmentally-friendly practices, many are looking to certifications to help them achieve their goals. The ISO 14001 certification, which is applicable to business across many industries, provides a valuable management system and standards for an organization looking to implement environmental practices. Ewald Biemans, owner of Aruba’s Bucuti Beach Resort, recently answered some questions about ISO 14001 certification and why Bucuti chose to pursue it. Biemans has been an environmental advocate for more than 30 years.

Green products have inundated the marketplace and the number of companies making green claims has also exploded. The timing has never been better for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to address green marketing claims so that consumers can trust that the products they purchase really do have the environmentally friendly attributes being marketed to them. On August 11, 2009, the FTC placed the green world on notice and charged several companies with making unsubstantiated, false and deceptive claims regarding bamboo fabric.

Hotels and restaurants that have been taking steps to green their cleaning operations may mistakenly be setting back their green cleaning programs as a result of H1N1 and other public health concerns. The problem is that eradicating from surfaces the germs, bacteria, and pathogens that can spread these diseases often requires the use of powerful, EPA-registered, hospital-grade disinfectants which they erroneously believe cannot be part of a green cleaning program. In the U.S. today, there are no disinfectants that can be marketed or labeled as green.

This is the first in a series of columns. It is the result of conversations with top industry professionals regarding the greening of lodging properties. Throughout those discussions there were several threads regarding how best to make impactful green measures happen. Engaging employees, developing a sound plan, and successfully implementing it all involve the human side of the organization, not just the hardware. In a service sector company, there is even more of a need to better understand the process, not just the products.

Social media applications such as Facebook, You Tube and Linked In are becoming quite popular, but what is really making an impact, since Oprah Winfrey discovered it, is Twitter. Tweeting, as many refer to it, is sending a 140-character real-time virtual message from just about anywhere. You can send it from your cell phone or computer; wherever you are as long as you have the right applications. According to Nielsen Claritas, which provides in-depth segmentation analysis of consumer behavior, online data shows that about half of the U.S. population visited a social networking website in the last year.

As hotel properties move toward green cleaning and the use of more environmentally responsible cleaning systems, chemicals, and equipment, hotel managers will not only want to know how best to maintain their stone floors, but also how to do it in a more environmentally responsible manner. Before developing any type of cleaning program for stone floors, including a green cleaning system, the first step is to review the manufacturers’ guidelines. Many manufacturers provide these on their websites.

The hospitality industry has been dramatically affected by the growing green movement. Sustainable, eco-friendly design and construction practices are now part of almost all major hotel building projects, including retrofits and property operations. Yet despite these changes, there are still many situations in which green cleaning is being overlooked. Hotel administrators and housekeeping departments must realize that sustainable building and design practices are just one puzzle piece.