Is your hotel conservation-oriented and blatantly wasteful?
Going green signal’s your hotel’s intention of taking sustainability seriously. Just about every hotel seems intent on giving out that signal and just about every hotel, especially the ones up the rung, is emitting a horribly mixed-signal. Very often, I’ve found that all too familiar standard sign-board that tells me how the hotel will save x gallons of water and y kilowatts of energy by not changing the bed sheets and towels. What do these green messages tell me? That the hotel cares about the environment and/or wants to save the planet, and I get that. But, while I welcome the all too common ‘turn down’ service as a good thing, do I really need to return to my room with every lamp and light switched on and the TV screen running? Seriously, when I’m told to hang my towel to save energy only to arrive at a room which is fully lit up, I find that disconcerting.
There was this hotel in London which I stayed at when attending WTM some years ago, where the receptionist at check-in gave me two key cards despite my having booked a single room. When I asked her about it she explained that the second key card would be handy for keeping the power on when I left the room, especially if I left with my charger plugged in. Now the purpose of such card-activated time switches is to reduce energy costs: the removal of the card ensures that some/all electronic appliances are turned off when the card is taken out from the slot. I had trouble understanding what was the whole point of the hotel spending on an ‘energy saving’ arrangement, because what eventually happened was that my second key card stayed in the slot, heating my room right throughout my stay – irrespective of whether I was in or out of it . I’m second guessing here that the desk staff was working around the system because of having to deal with guests who complained that their apps didn’t charge whilst they were out at dinner. It’s a case of desk staff knowing more about real usability than the designers and that’s why experts suggest that hoteliers should clearly define the purpose of every room in their hotel, and then tweak the property’s energy controls based on this purpose and any changes in occupancy or need.
If you work 8 to 5 in an office and happen to be the last to leave the workplace, you would in all likelihood, be expected to switch off the lights and the air-conditioning before clocking out. Basically, when this happens, your actions have contributed towards real savings because the supply of energy to power unoccupied spaces has been cut-off, and, if your office is open Monday to Friday only, the savings are even greater due to the weekend closure (5 p.m. Fri to 9 a.m. Mon). Now, you might ask why this similar approach can’t be applied in hotels and the answer to that is… yes it is, thanks to technology.
Decades ago, hotels were far less inclined to share information about room occupancy, with each other. Some hotels resorted to concealing low occupancy spells by having the lights of road-side facing guest rooms’ switched on as night fell. Housekeeping staff were assigned rooms that were going to be unsold for the night and staff went into each such room around twilight to switch on the lights. They re-entered the room again around 10pm to turn the lights off. With soaring energy costs and a shift towards sustainability, this practice was eventually abandoned.
On the flip-side of this coin and for totally different reasons, hotels now use guest room sensors that give them control to turn off all its unoccupied guest room lights and air-conditioners twice a day, once at 9.00 a.m. and again at night. In other words, these sensors enable the property to detect when guests are present or on property thus taking the human element out of the equation… and ofcourse leading to a better bottom line.
One of the basic precepts of sustainable hotel operations is the need to control the use of energy – something that modern technology can actively assist. Imagine how much energy it takes to get a room to 19-20 degrees on a hot day where the temperature outside is 35 degrees. Hotel guests can be outside their room sometimes for as long as eight hours or more, and when that room is unoccupied with the air-conditioner and lights are on – all that energy is wasted.
Many hotels get caught up in what food and beverage to serve, what entertainment is on hand or how many arrivals/departures to handle, but if you already understand the patterns of your guests and where they will be – be it in the room or other public spaces including meeting rooms, then you can control your energy output.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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