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How Green Is Your Hotel?

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LEED certification at CityCenter, Las Vegas. (Image via Wikipedia)

A big green hooray for you!

You've dutifully hung your towels on the rack instead of leaving them on the bathroom floor. You've chosen hotels with low-flow showers and compact fluorecent light bulbs. You've opted for shampoo from a dispenser instead of those tiny bottles. And a big green hooray for the hotels offering these amenities (and saving on operating costs in the process).

Which of these environmental features is the traveler's favorite?

Turns out: none of them. Or all of them. "These green attributes are important to travelers," says Michelle Millar, assistant professor, University of San Francisco School of Management. "But it seems that the most important is whether the hotel has some kind of certification that says it's green." Millar and Seyhmus Baloglu, of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, surveyed 571 business and leisure travelers and published the results in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. It claims to be the first study to examine hotels' green initiatives from the travelers' perspective.

But not all certifications are alike, since different agencies have different standards. Millar says LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] certification administered by the U.S. Green Building Council headquartered in Washington, DC, is "probably the standard, although it’s very expensive."

A LEED design and construction review for a hotel can cost as much as $27,500. Factors include site location, water efficiency, energy use, materials and indoor air quality, weighed against whether the building is new or a conversion of an existing building. Out of a 100 point scale, 80-plus points earns a platinum rating (10 hotels so far), through gold and silver down to 40-49 points for plain vanilla LEED certification.

"The hospitality industry has become a mainstay of the green building movement," says  Doug Gatlin, USGBC's vice president of market development. "USGBC has been seeing dramatic growth in the number of LEED-certified hotel properties in the past two years." As of August 4, 2011, USGBC reports that 132 projects have achieved LEED certification, while another 1,069 are in the process.   

States have also gotten into the act; among them, Florida, California and Maryland have their own green building standards.

Then there's Houston-based "Green" Hotels Association, which doesn't recommend certification. Rather, its member hotels register by mail after voluntarily committing to saving water and energy and reducing waste. "How they do that is up to them," says founder and president Patty Griffin. "A hotel in New York City, in Phoenix, Arizona or on the coast will have different needs and different guests." 

Member hotels pay $150 plus $1 per room annually, receive 159 pages of eco-friendly guidelines and can purchase collateral such as "Green" Hotels Association stickers and flags. "WE GUARANTEE MORE MONEY WILL BE SAVED than the membership costs by implementing these ideas," reads the association's website.

But how does the association guarantee that the hotels are living up to green goals? "Guests lean on them," says Griffin. "We want them to let the management know that they want to participate in green programs."

A big green hooray for them too.