I’ve just recently returned from a month in Western Canada, about half of it spent onsite. It was a good trip, but I have a quibble with one of the hotels where I stayed.
It’s a small quibble, as quibbles go. You wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that if this was my only complaint, I actually had a pretty good stay.
But this is a small quibble with bigger implications. It’s something that should have been easy to correct, and the facility’s inability to solve it through most of a six-day booking speaks volumes about whether our industry is up to the bigger sustainability challenges.
The quibble is about…a newspaper. Three newspapers, actually, one delivered to my door each morning over the first half of my visit.
Sustainability in hotels and meeting facilities depends on a series of large issues like the design of the building, the efficiency of the equipment, whether lighting units have been fitted with compact fluorescent bulbs, whether electricity is supplied from renewable sources.
But there are dozens of smaller things that hotels can and should do to reduce their footprint. They can save water, energy, and money by taking guests at our word when we insist that we don’t need our linens changed every day. (Most major chains advertise towel reuse programs, but very few hotels actually deliver on them.) And they can stop wasting paper and ink, along with the toxic heavy metals the ink may contain, by making it easy to opt out of daily newspaper delivery.
When I arrived at this particular hotel, I went through the check-in routine that’s become my onsite standard. I instituted my own linen reuse program by putting out a Do Not Disturb sign, and after a stack of newsprint arrived on the first morning, I called the desk to unsubscribe. On Days 2 and 3, I brought the newspaper down to the desk and explained why I didn’t want it, and a very patient clerk promised to pass the information on to the outside contractor who does the deliveries. After Day 3, I started drafting this post. On Day 4, the deliveries stopped—but by then, most short-run travellers would already have left the building.
My objection was mainly about the environmental footprint of a printed format I haven’t used in years, though partly about the content of the publication itself. You see, the paper the hotel delivered most mornings was the National Post, a nasty piece of advocacy reporting that drives many Canadians to distraction with its deliberate political slant.
I didn’t want any newspaper delivered, but I certainly wasn’t happy to see a publication that has so little use for the principles of balance and fairness that I learned in journalism school. Every time a newspaper lands outside your guest room, it’s added to the circulation figures that help that publication justify its advertising rates. I don’t want to be deemed a part of the National Post’s audience base, not even for a few days.
(For readers south of the Canada-U.S. border, imagine if a media baron with a grudge built a major news outlet in your country for the express purpose of pushing public discourse in a particular political direction. Oh, wait…)
I’m not suggesting that a facility should boycott the Pest just because I do, or that hotels should suspend newspaper delivery for guests who want it. But at a time when personalized service is an industry mantra, it shouldn’t be so hard to accommodate a simple preference—without it having to be explained three times. Hotels can track the type of pillow a guest uses and whether they prefer a room on an upper or lower floor. If they expect to be taken seriously on sustainability, a good first step is to ask the right questions…and listen to the answers.
The problem is that this isn’t just about newspapers (or political screeds masquerading as newspapers). Getting the small stuff right—whether it’s newspapers, towel programs, or in-room recycling—is dead easy, and should have been standard industry practice a decade ago.
If we’re still having this conversation, do we really think hotels—or any other corner of the meetings industry—will be ready for an 80% cut in carbon emissions over the next 15 to 30 years? And if customers see us tripping up on even the most basic green initiatives, will they even believe us when we claim to be tackling the bigger issues? At the moment, I’m not so sure they should.