A big tip of the hat this week to Marriott for the opening of its 100th Element Hotel. Truth be told, Element Hotels was first launched by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide back in 2006. The Element brand was part of the merger of Starwood with Marriott in 2016. The Element Salt Lake City Downtown (hotel No. 100) is part of a dual-branded property. The other part of the development is Le Méridien Salt Lake City Downtown. Like Starwood, over the years, Marriott has consistently incorporated green features into its Element properties. In the press release announcing the 100th Element,...

Our industry has a lot of all stars who come up with great ideas. I spoke with one of them this past week. His name is Floris Licht, and he is the full-time General Manager of the DoubleTree by Hilton Amsterdam Centraal Station. He has an impressive side gig: He is Chief Planting Officer for Hotels for Trees, a nonprofit that has planted more than 105,000 trees since the program launched in July 2021. That is quite a patch of trees. What Hotels for Trees offers is an alternative for those hotels that incentivize guests to opt out of housekeeping...

This week I learned about a story of heroism at a convention center and a story of tragedy at a hotel in India. Lessons can be learned from both stories. First, the story of heroism and thanks to the folks at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for sharing it. Michael and Katherine Diegan, of Daphne, Alabama, were attendees at the “New Orleans Blastoff” volleyball tournament on the weekend of January 14. On Saturday, they encountered an individual outside the convention center who had been jogging in the Pedestrian Park, experiencing a medical emergency. Quickly ascertaining that the man,...

This week I will be attending The NAFEM Show (North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers) in Orlando. The show runs from February 1 to 3 at the Orange County Convention Center. I am looking forward to it and will report on the event in next week’s column. There are currently 541 exhibitors. I will be on the lookout for new innovations and technologies—specifically ones that help hoteliers save energy and water and reduce waste. Within foodservice there has been a lot of chatter recently about the health risks of gas stoves. According to The New York Times, mounting evidence...

In recent years, Green Lodging News has published articles about companies that offer machines that transform moisture in the air to drinking water. It is a great idea of course and when matched with a glass bottling system can do a great job at eliminating plastic bottle waste. This past week, Accor announced that it is partnering with SOURCE Global, PBC to bring reusable glass bottled drinking water—water from the air—to key hotels in Singapore. Unique to this water is that it is made by SOURCE Hydropanels—a ground-breaking solar-powered technology that harvests the pure, endlessly renewable water vapor in the...

On a typical day in the U.S., there are thousands of requests for emergency shelter that are unmet. There are different reasons folks need such housing—domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual assault, and other crimes. Fortunately, an increasing number of hotel companies are stepping up to provide rooms for those victims in need through the Safe Stays by ReloShare alliance. According to ReloShare, there are now more than 13,000 hotels participating. A big supporter of ReloShare has been Choice Hotels International, which, as of January 10, had more than six thousand U.S. hotels activated with ReloShare to provide safe housing solutions. Choice...

In last week’s column I listed the top 10 most read articles that were posted on Green Lodging News in 2022. In thinking about the last year, I came up with a list of trends I see continuing, emerging—even exploding—in our industry that will continue into this new year. A continuation and increase in goal setting. Whether in alignment with the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals or not, more and more companies, both public and private, are setting goals for decreases in greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water consumption, and waste reduction. Food waste and plastic waste (and climate...

A very happy new year to you! May it be a greener one and a more prosperous one for all of you. Green Lodging News will turn 17 this year—very hard to believe—and in that time the Green Lodging News website has accumulated more than 13,000 articles, many of which make the most read articles overall list time and time again. For this column, as has been done in previous years, I list the most read articles on the website for only those articles that were posted in the previous year—2022 in this case, of course. The articles are somewhat...

As reported on Green Lodging News this past week, Greenview just released its Green Lodging Trends Report (GLTR). It is news for many reasons, but the two main ones are its size and its sole focus on sustainability best practices. The 83-page report is based on data received from about 27,000 hotels across 54 countries. The report was first launched in 2016 and published from 2016 to 2018. Covid disrupted publication of the report, but Greenview continued its work. The result: The 2022 GLTR dataset is six times greater than the 2018 GLTR dataset. I posted two articles on the...

Reducing our industry’s environmental impact takes teamwork and making best practices easily available so that those who are not as far along the green path can copy and improve upon what has been done. That is the message behind the announcement this past week by AHLA to launch Responsible Stay, an industry-wide commitment to make meetings, events, and guest experiences in America’s hotels more environmentally and socially responsible. (See article on Green Lodging News.) The Responsible Stay website details the program’s principles and areas of focus, provides examples of what more than 20 companies are doing, features company success snapshots,...