Nowadays, nearly every hotel touts its record of environmental responsibility while asking guests to hang up their towels. Back in the 1990s, the word “sustainability” hadn’t joined the lexicon yet – but increasing awareness of environmental issues was bearing fruit as hotels discovered that they could save some serious cash while they were saving the environment.
In 1990, the International Hotel and Restaurant Association in Paris founded the Green Hoteliers of the Year awards, and the March 1997 issue of HOTELS highlighted what leading hotel companies were doing, including the corporate winner, Ann Checkley-Layton, an executive at Canadian Pacific Hotels & Resorts.
The company’s four-point plan, which she developed and spearheaded, involved waste management, water conservation, energy reduction and responsible purchasing, leading to tens of thousands of dollars saved over the course of a few years.
Back in the 1990s, that cost-cutting involved recycling and composting, using reusable plastic cups, and a few other efforts that yielded savings in waste removal expenses. But there were bigger issues to tackle: “Finding the right things to do is not the greatest challenge, Checkley-Layton said at the time. “It is getting people to truly, emotionally buy into these ideas and change their behavior.”
Another award winner, Peter McAlpine, total quality manager (remember, this was the ’90s) at Phuket Yacht Club Hotel & Beach Resort in Thailand, took his environmental pitch to the people of Phuket, which was threatened by overdevelopment and mismanagement. His efforts were paying off, and at the time of the article, McAlpine was hoping to implement a formal structure for ecotourism – another new-ish word in the 1990s – in Thailand.
#ThrowbackThursday is a weekly feature during 2016, when HOTELS magazine celebrates its 50th anniversary.