Hotels become your home away from home whether you are planning to stay for one night or a couple of weeks. In the same way that you live out your daily life as a responsible, eco-conscious person you should seek to find travel accommodation that reflects your approach to living.
You need to find hotels and accommodation that share your values, seek to conserve the environment and of course, offer something that is within your budget. This is not always such an easy task but thankfully companies all around the world are recognizing the value of eco-friendly business practices. All you eco-conscious travelers are to thank for the direction companies are heading because with our increased demand for saving the environment, businesses are listening and continually changing and improving.
Be cautious of supposed “green claims”. As the demand for eco-friendly travel is on the rise, you have many companies that simply state that they are “going green”, when in fact there actual practices are far from the truth. Some tools that can assist you in finding the true “greenies” out there are available. We would like to share some tips and questions to ask yourself when choosing an appropriate hotel or accommodation.
Questions to ask
Hotels are one of those aspects of the tourism industry that are usually in a fixed location. They generally stay in that same location for many years, this is very unlike travel agents, tour operators, guides, aircrafts, even air lines, which come and go through the years. With the permanence of hotels comes two eco-performance drawbacks. Firstly, with a long lifespan comes the potential for an equally lengthy environmental impact and secondly, the older an establishment, the more resistant to change it may be.
Hotels in Paris have been making grate efforts on becoming green for the last five years and we will focus on this city amoung other most visited countries in Europe and around the world to help you find eco friendly hotels.
Any hotel claiming to be ecologically sound must have a written environmental policy – and if the hotel is part of a large chain, it may well have an attractive corporate environmental policy for you to see. Whatever the style of presentation, it should contain the answers to many important questions.
Ideally a fair proportion of local staff should feature on their payroll – and not just in menial grades – and the establishment should return some of its money into the economy by sourcing at least some food, products or services from the area. In addition, the way they treat waste, water and wastewater can be important indicators of the real state of their overall eco-awareness, not least because of the serious problems associated with all three in many regions of the world.
If they have a way to measure the effectiveness of their environmental policy, then this is all to the good, since without some form of assessment, however well intentioned they may be, it is almost impossible to quantify their actual performance. Even if such a regime exists, verifying the results for yourself may be almost impossible, especially at a distance. Sometimes it just has to come down to a judgement call – are they really eco-aware, or simply doing some heavy green-washing?
Here are some categories to consider when weighing up the eco-credentials of a hotel:
• Energy: do they invest in sustainable energy
• Water: what is their water source, how do they recycle and dispose of waste
• Disposal: do they assist recycling or conservation projects
• Eco-Active: do they aim towards responsible tourism, supporting the local economy
• Protection: how did they develop the land on which they are built, do they use indigenous plants, do they protect their immediate environment
When a hotel takes these categories into account and has sound eco-friendly solutions to dealing with them, this should reflect their green qualities.
A true eco hotel should also fulfill most of the following criteria before you take it into consideration:
• Dependence on the natural environment
• Ecological sustainability
• Proven contribution to conservation
• Provision of environmental training programs
• Incorporation of cultural considerations
• Provision of an economic return to the local community
Seek help where you can find it
If you are lucky, other links in your holiday chain may have done the work for you, so if you have selected your travel agent or tour company wisely and are confident of their commitment to eco-ideals, you can probably relax. Many of the specialist eco-tourist companies take great care to ensure that the hotels they use meet the highest standards and some travel agencies, particularly those of the more “niche” variety, are also very well informed on hotel eco-performance. While this is not really an independent endorsement, it does at least provide some degree of external verification. However, although a simple web search will reveal any number of hotels claiming to be eco-friendly, sometimes a truly third-party assessment is available – either in one of the newspapers or environmental magazines, or by an eco-tourism organisation.
While a lot of this information may seem like it will take you a lot of time to consider. Remember that you are the one that makes the difference. You have all our resources at your disposal and we are committed to bringing you the latest eco friendly travel news so that you don’t have to spend endless hours comparing eco-credentials. We don’t have any ulterior motive, we simply dream of a greener planet and the only way to pursue that dream is to make the lives of avid travelers simpler, bringing all the information they need on green travelling, right to their doorstep.
Don’t travel hoping someone else makes a difference. We can all start today.
Editorial Director
