the Green Hotel Initiative

About the Green Hotel Initiative

According to the Travel Industry Association of America, US business travel expenditures totaled $185 billion in 2000, with $37 billion spent on accommodation alone. The Green Hotel Initiative (GHI) is a Ceres program designed to increase and demonstrate market demand for environmentally responsible hotel services. Despite the promotion of environmentally sound practices by environmental advocates, even within the industry, hotels currently feel little demand for these services.

The leaders behind the GHI - including representatives from business, the hotel industry, labor, academia, and environmental advocacy organizations - have identified the tremendous potential for the combined buying power of corporate and organizational purchasers of hotel services. The ongoing challenge for the GHI is to determine how to leverage that buying power to increase the supply of green hotel services - for both businesses (as institutional purchasers) and individual travelers.

In this respect, the GHI's work is focused on:

• Educating purchasers of hotel services, particularly large buyers such as corporate meeting planners, about what they can ask from lodging providers,
• Creating vehicles for these purchasers to express their demand for these services, and
• Providing mechanisms for hotels to communicate their environmental performance.

Tools

Best Practice Survey, an easy-to-use list of criteria that helps a purchaser to assess a hotel's environmental commitment and performance. Using the survey enables decision-makers to choose hotels that meet all business needs, including their own environmental preferences. This tool also helps make the hotel industry aware of business demand for "green" accommodations.

GHI Guest Request Card , a tool to help individual travelers request environmentally responsible services upon checking-in to a hotel, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback when checking-out. This tool also sends an important message to hotels that there is a customer demand for environmentally friendly services. To order cards for your organization please use the GHI Guest Request Card order form.

GHI Community, offers a free online list serve that enables participants to become part of a virtual community of green hotel advocates. In the past, the breadth of organizations and sectors that have contributed to the efforts of the GHI community have included Swissôtel, Saunders Hotel Group, Meeting Strategies Worldwide, Fairmont Hotel and Resorts, Eco-Logical Solutions, Green Seal, Inc., Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, Nike, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, PA Consulting Group, Meeting Strategies World Wide, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Co-op America, Ocean's Blue Foundation, and Conservation International.

Current State of GHI

The GHI is an important industry program within the Ceres network. We work with hotels and the GHI network and also respond to requests for our Best Practice Survey and Guest Request Cards - tools that continue to advance our work.