Throughout 2021, an average of 35,000 different people visited our website each month. Throughout the year, there were certain articles that captured those readers’ attention more than others. In many cases those articles were from previous years which proves that Green Lodging News has truly become an archive for research. Here then are the top 10 articles that garnered the most page views in 2021. 1. Why & How Polyurethane is Environmentally Friendly for the Construction Industry. 2. Virgin Hotels Reaffirms Commitment to Prioritizing Diversity & Inclusivity. 3. Feeling the Heart of Hospitality Throughout the Year–Especially This Year. 4. Five Different Ways Hotels...

With this being the last column before many of you will be vacationing, I would like to thank you for your loyal readership of Green Lodging News in 2021. Once again it has been quite a tumultuous year with some semblance of normalcy and even better than normalcy in some markets. It was great to see a return to some trade show and conference activity. There certainly has been no decline in news about sustainability practices during the pandemic and I will be listing the top stories of the year based on readership in my next column. A big thank...

It has been almost eight years since I moved down to Florida from Ohio. One of the most common sights I noticed quickly when I moved here was the lawn service trucks. Just about everybody uses them to keep their lawns green, growing and weed and pesticide-free. The volume of chemicals poured on the state each year must be a staggering number. Soil is a common pathway to groundwater, and soil characteristics determine the rate at which chemicals move through it. Of course, in Florida the soil is mostly sand—very porous. The chemicals sprayed here feed algae and kill fish. Perhaps...

Is formally identifying your property as a green hotel becoming more important? That certainly seems to be the case with an increasing number of organizations saying they will recognize green or sustainable hotels on their websites. Back in September, according to Bloomberg, Google began labeling hotels as “Eco-Certified” in its global search results, with a leaf-shaped icon next to the hotel’s name. The new feature relies on 29 certification programs to establish a hotel’s green credibility. The term “green hotel” has quadrupled in search volume since March 2020, according to Google Trends. Earlier this month, Booking.com, one of the world’s leading...

This past week the National Restaurant Assn. released the results of its What’s Hot Culinary Forecast for 2022, which offers a detailed look at the topics, trends, and products expected to drive restaurant menus in the coming year across a variety of categories including daypart occasions, menu categories, beverages, flavors, global inspirations, packaging/off-premises trends and industry macro-trends. The What’s Hot survey was conducted in October 2021. More than 350 professional chefs of the American Culinary Federation rated 109 food items and culinary concepts compiled by Association experts and Technomic’s Menu Research & Insights Division. Download the full report here. After demand for comfort...

San Luis Obispo (SLO), California is a city on the Central Coast of California with about 50,000 people. The city’s goal is to become carbon neutral by 2035, encourages alternative means of transportation and is eliminating single-use plastics. What caught my eye this past week is SLO’s announcement that it is the first U.S. destination to launch an urban reforestation sustainability initiative funded by local hotels. Through the new Keys for Trees program, part of the City’s Climate Action Plan, the San Luis Obispo Tourism Business Improvement District will dedicate 1 percent of annual revenue to planting 10,000 trees throughout the community by...

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is technology that passes electric power over twisted-pair Ethernet cable to powered devices, such as wireless access points, IP cameras, and VoIP phones in addition to the data that cable usually carries. As mentioned last week, The Sinclair, part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection of hotels, has taken the traditional use of PoE and gone much farther. Sinclair Holdings, the hotel’s developer, opted for PoE, utilizing Cisco Digital Building Switches, to power the hotel’s lights, window shades, smart mirrors, and minibars. The hotel opened a year ago in Fort Worth Texas. I interviewed Hannah Walker, Chief...

For the first time in many years I will not be attending HX: The Hotel Experience or Boutique Design New York (BDNY). Both trade shows will be taking place at the Javits Center in New York from November 14 to 15—as one combined show, I just learned from an exhibitor. It is a bit confusing because as I am writing this both shows still have their own separate websites. HX and under its former name—the International Hotel, Motel & Restaurant Show (IHMRS)—used to be my favorite show. There was a time when it took up two levels of the...

The CEO of leading sustainability solutions company Green Places, Alex Lassiter, recently sat down with Eric Corey Freed, an award-winning architect, author, and global speaker, to ask him a few questions about the importance of building sustainably. They touched on: what makes a building sustainable, costs involved with building sustainably, scaling green building programs, common obstacles, financial considerations, and the importance of broad adoption. His insights are important for the green building sector overall—including hotels. A big thank you to Green Places for allowing me to share this insightful Q&A article. (You can also see it here in its...

New statistics released this past week were just plain scary. If there was ever a need for an emergency summit of our industry’s leaders, now would be the time. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 892,000 accommodation and food-services workers quit their jobs in August. According to an article in INSIDER, the magnitude of that number is partly explained by the fact that accommodation and food services is a big sector that generally employs a lot of people—but the sector’s quit rate also led all others in the economy. In fact, the industry’s quit rate...