Ingrained within hotel companies’ corporate social responsibility programs is the support of local, small businesses. One of the groups hit hardest by the pandemic is small-business suppliers—businesses often located close to the hotels they supply. At this difficult time, please go the extra mile to support these types of businesses. They typically are more vulnerable to failure when the economy takes a dive. One story that caught my eye in the past few weeks is Hyatt’s rollout of its Hyatt Loves Local initiative, a global effort by Hyatt hotels to uplift and collaborate with small businesses that have been impacted...

This past week was a busy week for news and feature placement on Green Lodging News. It was two weeks ago I wrote about the Global Wellness Summit at The Breakers Palm Beach (Fla.) and how it was planning to have an in-person component—different during these times. This past week I published a report sent to me by the folks behind the summit. They reported a successful, safe summit with more than 100 in-person delegates. Be sure to read that article. Over the years I have written several articles about lodging establishments made from used shipping containers. A little more...

What an adventure the past couple of weeks have been for all of us—with news developments impacting our industry dramatically—a new president who immediately announced a new COVID-19 advisory task force, the news that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could be up to 90 percent effective, yet day upon day of records for new virus cases that are certainly keeping travelers from wanting to travel to hotels in those hot spots. Without getting political here, please keep up the mask wearing, the hand washing, the social distancing, and require those of your guests. I dropped my son off at his after-care program...

Many of you rely on meetings business for a good portion of your revenue and livelihood—me included. So, getting back to the point of being able to meet in person is huge. When the Global Wellness Summit (GWS) takes place at The Breakers Palm Beach from November 8 to 11—perhaps as you are reading this—there will be 150 meeting at the hotel. Yes, AT the hotel—truly an accomplishment. Hundreds more will be attending virtually from around the world. Yesterday Florida had more than 6,000 new cases of the Coronavirus—the highest daily number in months. It will be interesting to...

Every so often someone comes along in our industry with a grand idea to affect major change in hotel operations. I have been fortunate to meet Shawn Seipler, CEO of Clean the World, who has done so much to change the way our industry thinks and acts about soap and amenity waste. Shawn is based in Orlando. Another person I have met is also based in Florida but in Sarasota. His name is Richard Ferrell, and he is President of Purlin, LLC. I first wrote about Purlin in 2018. Richard’s vision is to dramatically change the way hoteliers think...

COVID-19 has certainly increased interest in hotel indoor air quality (IAQ). How could it not when you have a potentially deadly virus that spreads primarily through the air? While scientifically a challenge to detect COVID-19 in the air, it is possible to create and monitor conditions that make transmission of viruses like COVID-19 less likely. I have written about various technologies in Green Lodging News that help improve IAQ by killing airborne viruses. It is not just COVID-19 that has increased interest in air quality lately. It is also the growing number of forest fires in the western United States as...

Richard Rubin, Founder and CEO of Repvblik, is being offered 20 to 30 hotels a week. There is a good reason for the calls. Rubin’s company has figured out how to convert a distressed hotel into a profitable one—in the middle of a pandemic. This of course is far more environmentally advantageous than building the same hotel from ground up. I first reported about Richard and his company back in May when his company announced it had almost completed the conversion of a former 423-key Day’s Inn property in Branson, Mo. into apartments. That property, now called Plato’s Cave,...

Does your property light pollute? Perhaps you have not even thought about it but light pollution, as defined by the International Dark-Sky Assn., is “the inappropriate or excessive use of artificial light.” A big thank you to UpSpring PR for making me aware of some of the issues related to light pollution and what can be done to minimize it. They cited four expert opinions in their recent e-mail to me. (To see how bad light pollution is near you, check out the NASA Blue Marble Navigator.) In a nutshell, light pollution can have many negative impacts on wildlife and...

Different recessions have different reasons for happening but there is one thing they all have in common: the need for government stimulus and bailout if necessary, to preserve industries and jobs. The numbers we have all been seeing in recent months and especially recent weeks have been just plain scary and I strongly encourage you to support the efforts of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) and other travel organizations in their efforts to get our government to come together on some type of aid for travel. Please write to your congressional representatives to ask for it. This...

Some of the most read articles on Green Lodging News address the hand dryer versus paper towel debate. The articles have had thousands of page views. There are various ways to approach the debate—from a waste standpoint, for example, or a hygiene standpoint. It is certainly a topic of interest today given COVID-19 so hygiene has become topic No. 1. I received news from Excel Dryer this past week of the results of a University of Arizona Health Sciences research team study entitled, Comparison of electric hand dryers and paper towels for hand hygiene: a critical review of the literature....