Explore what a green hotel should be

No sector of the travel industry has more of an economic and behavioral impact than the hotel business. Even the smallest changes in purchasing behavior can actually affect the planet in huge ways.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of a responsible hotel’s buying power, one particularly enterprising UK service provider has come up with a novel solution: a virtual online “green hotel”.

Since its inception ten years ago, Best Western’s Beacon Purchasing has become the UK’s largest purchasing consortium for the independent hospitality sector. The group is home to about 2000 members, ranging from hotels and guest houses to restaurants, camping grounds to visitor attractions.

The company has worked to provide members with easy access to supplies and services, offering everything from central billing to paperless invoicing to its latest on-line purchasing system, Beacon Online.

Now, the group is setting its sights on the “green” travel market.

Diane Webster, Head of Sales and Marketing for Beacon, hatched the idea for an interactive “real hotel in a virtual world”, allowing Beacon members to learn from practical and relevant information highlighting some of the actions they can take, large or small, to make a genuine contribution to responsible purchasing.

Webster’s project is aiming to open new doors for members’ social responsibility, specifically their environmentally-friendly purchasing commitments.

Spotlight on green

For many hotel guests and restaurant customers today, the concepts of climate change, carbon footprints, and energy conservation are a mainstay of daily life. Beacon has challenged itself to figure out a way to help members tackle what are now mainstream ideas.

“It’s not always easy to know what practical and commercially viable steps can be taken to become ‘green’. It’s more complex than we think,” Webster said. She wanted to help customers in their CR journey, as well as increase Beacon’s CR commitment, and she and her team now preside over a tool with a difference.

Over the past eighteen months, Webster has been working closely with both the Green Tourism Business Scheme (national sustainable tourism certification scheme for the UK) and Beacon’s key suppliers, who actively source and supply sustainable products and services, to develop and launch this new service.

Visitors to the hotel embark on a 3D virtual tour of its interior spaces, which use interactive hotspots to showcase a range of “green” advice, hints and tips, the products or services they will need and the suppliers who can supply them.

“The idea behind the ‘virtual’ green hotel was always to start something that we could develop into a much larger initiative,” she continued. “As Beacon and our supplier partners enhance their green credentials, so will the hotel develop, providing a strong foundation for the future promotion of green products and information. We do recognise that it’s a journey for all of us but at least it’s one that we’ve started.”

The future looks bright

“We’ve had a great deal of interest from suppliers in becoming involved in this and we have a number of new areas planned for the hotel,” added Webster. “The great thing about developing a virtual hotel like this is that we can keep changing it, much like hotels change in the real world – a new restaurant, an extension, introduce a new heating system, lay out a new area of gardens, and so on. There is no limit to the ideas so far!”

For more info, visit beacongreenhotel.co.uk/green-hotel.php.