Last week, Joie de Vivre, operator of 29 boutique hotels in California, launched Joie de Vivre Green Dreams, a new portal on its website. Joie de Vivre Green Dreams is also the name of the company’s environmental program. Be sure to check out this new website. Its design is appealing, user friendly and worth emulating. The site spells out the company’s environmental policy and provides links to green travel tips and helpful online resources. What is most unique about the site, however, is the property scorecard section. There, through a colored “leaf” system, Joie de Vivre reveals how far...

I was fortunate to attend the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Boston for two days last week. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, it is the annual conference and trade show of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the creator of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification program. When Greenbuild was first held in 2002, 4,000 people attended. Last year in Chicago, attendance was approximately 22,000. On the first day alone of this year’s event, more than 26,000 people packed the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. That was good news for...

This past week I had the opportunity to attend the International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show (IH/M&RS) in New York. For those of you who did not attend, you missed a great opportunity to learn about steps you can take and products you can purchase to increase your property’s profitability during these difficult times. According to Melissa Gray, marketing manager for the show, the event featured 2,250 exhibitor booths and drew 34,050 attendees. In years past, the show drew enough exhibitors to warrant two levels of exhibits. That has not happened for quite some time. The “green” exhibitors I spoke...

“Hush hush.” I heard that phrase several times while talking to suppliers of products that help to address bedbug infestations. Hotel, motel, resort and inn operators like to keep bedbug problems quiet and out of the news media, and off of the many websites that allow visitors to comment on their stays. I wouldn’t blame anyone at all for wanting to be silent; the little critters are a potential financial, public relations and legal nightmare. I was told stories about hoteliers having to rip out entire rooms in an attempt to get rid of the pests. I read articles...

Almost everyone who reads Green Lodging News is in one form of sales or another—whether one runs a lodging establishment or sells a product or service. As a sales representative for your company, you have to be constantly mindful of sales and networking opportunities. If you are doing your job well, you already have a great website, make sales calls relentlessly, are a member of the various local, state and national industry associations (and actually attend their meetings), and exhibit at and attend trade shows where purchasing decision makers congregate. If you are really smart, you take advantage of...

I have always had an interest in composting—even when I was a child. What fruit and vegetable scraps I generate today are placed in a compost pile just outside my home. Every now and then, I add soil, relocate earthworms that I find to the pile, and turn everything over a few times. In a tiny way, I am helping to reduce the flow of food waste to the local landfill. If you happen to run a full-service hotel with a restaurant, bar and meeting space, food waste is obviously not so easy to manage. This past week I wrote...

I suspect that most of you are familiar with the term “greenwashing”. According to Wikipedia, it is a term used to describe the perception of consumers that they are being misled by a company regarding its environmental practices or the environmental benefits of a product or service. (Picture a TV commercial that includes a Hummer driving through a pristine forest with birds singing and deer dancing.) Did you know that the term was born in the lodging industry? It is kind of embarrassing, but true. This is what Wikipedia has to say about the origin of the word: “Greenwashing was...

Dennis Quaintance, the CEO and CDO (Chief Design Officer) of Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, must be a football fan. During a conversation with him this past week, he kept on using the phrase “go deep” when asked what advice he would give to a hotel developer pursuing green building. Quaintance had every reason to be excited when we spoke—Super Bowl level excited. He just learned that his Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, N.C., had earned LEED for New Construction Platinum Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The Proximity Hotel is the first hotel in the United States to...

Could the measurement "Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Occupied Room" (GEPOR) one day be as common as revenue per available room (RevPAR)? In putting together its 2007 Sustainability Report—probably the first one produced by an individual hotel in the United States—the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. used the GEPOR metric to establish its specific annual carbon footprint. The Willard worked with Washington, D.C.-based EnviRelation, LLC to put together the report. EnviRelation, which provides emissions management services, created the GEPOR metric which takes into account criteria such as a hotel’s square footage, electricity and natural gas consumption, gallons of water...

What a week it was. Let’s hope we don’t see another one like it. While attending The Lodging Conference in Phoenix last week, an event that drew more than 1,400 people to The Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa, America’s leaders in Washington, D.C. debated how best to get our country out of what many were calling the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Added to that was the largest bank collapse (Washington Mutual) in U.S. history, and an almost unnoticed $25 billion in guaranteed government loans granted to Ford, General Motors and Chrysler to help keep them afloat....