If you had just three or four minutes to tell your property or company’s green story on video, what would you include? Who would you interview? What background music would you choose? Who would you hire to produce it? I thought about this after writing an article about the new Hotel Skyler in Syracuse, N.Y. (see article), and its owner’s quest for LEED Platinum certification. (The hotel will have its soft opening on April 1.) Turns out there was a video made about the project that includes comments from the hotel’s owner, the LEED AP on the project, the...

This past week I attended the Green Meeting Industry Council’s (GMIC) Sustainable Meetings Conference at the Doubletree Hotel Portland (Ore.). For the second year running, it was a well attended event with 250 in-person attendees and another 60 following along via webcast (see article). There were many highlights, including a keynote presentation by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, a nonprofit dedicated to education, advisory work and research in sustainable development. From a news standpoint, however, the most important development pertained to the upcoming Green Meeting and Events Voluntary Standards (see article). Following last year’s Sustainable Meeting Conference...

The technology has been rarely employed but another example of it surfaced this past week at the just-opened, 267-room Ritz-Carlton Toronto. What I am referring to is deep water cooling. The hotel’s ability to tap into this technology all had to do with location—its proximity to Lake Ontario and having access to a program offered to downtown Toronto buildings by the City of Toronto and Enwave Energy Corp. More than 200 feet below the surface of Lake Ontario, intake pipes draw cold water to a pumping station where, via heat exchangers, there is a transfer of energy between the icy...

A social media experiment that worked. When the marketing folks behind Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott first hatched the idea for the Small Business Road-to-Success Challenge last year, they had no idea what kind of response they would get. All they knew was that they were going to use social media—primarily Facebook and Twitter—to get the word out about the contest that would result in a small business being awarded $20,000. According to Shruti Gandhi Buckley, vice president, Global Brand Management, Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott, 300 companies entered the contest. From that group, 10 finalists were chosen....

In preparing my article this week on guestroom energy management systems, I spoke with representatives of 11 companies (see article). It is amazing how many companies there are now that either manufacture or distribute these types of systems (there are certainly more than 11). This space in lodging technology is very competitive. I had to chuckle several times when vendors, without naming names of course, took swipes at their competitors’ systems. “Key card systems are a flash in the pan,” one vendor said. Of course his company does not sell them. “The current sensor systems are not accurate enough,”...

If you have not yet marked your calendars for this year’s events at which green lodging/sustainability will be a focus, be sure to do so. Details for some of the events are still sketchy at the moment but for others there is complete information on speakers, trade show participants, etc. Be sure to keep checking our Events calendar as the year unravels. Just this past week I learned the dates of the 2011 West Coast Green Lodging Conference—August 21 to 24. I attended the first time event last summer in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., and eagerly await the details for...

MindClick SGM released the results of its ACTE (Association of Corporate Travel Executives) Sustainability Research Study this past week (see article). The purpose of the study was to better understand travel executives’ interest in green hospitality and what role sustainability plays in their procurement decisions. The online survey was conducted in July 2010 using U.S. and Canada based ACTE members. Survey respondents represented many different industries and managed travel budgets less than $10 million (31 percent of respondents), $10 million to $50 million (38 percent of respondents) and more than $50 million (31 percent of respondents). According to JoAnna...

The name may sometimes prompt a few giggles but Virgin Group’s Virgin Hotels is positioning itself to be a serious hotel developer in the United States—first in urban markets such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Miami. I had an opportunity to see a presentation by Raul Leal, president and COO of the company, at this past week’s NEWH Leadership Conference in Orlando. Leal impressed the crowd not only with what he said but how he said it—sprinkling in humor and insightful industry analysis—and received a standing ovation in the process. This guy was...

How long would you be willing to work toward green lodging certification? Six months? One year? Two years? Two years is how long the process was for the 379-room Portola Hotel & Spa in Monterey, Calif. The property just earned LEED Silver certification as part of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance certification program, falling just three points shy of LEED Gold. (See related article.) The Portola is among just a handful of hotel properties in the United States that have achieved LEED accreditation in the Existing Buildings category. I first met Janine Chicourrat,...

As the New Year begins, I have Boston on my mind. Why? This past week I spoke with Jeff Hanulec, director of engineering at the Westin Copley Place in Boston and learned about the outstanding work he and his green team are doing to reduce energy and water consumption. Considering the size of the hotel they are working in—38 stories and 803 rooms—their accomplishments over the last four years have been impressive. Total utility costs in November 2006 were $337,883. In November of this year they were just $178,235. It is a pretty safe bet that rates for water...