Hotel Hypocrisy

I’m generally pretty easy going, there isn’t much that annoys me in life, but like most people I have a couple of unexplainable pet peeves.

This week has involved a series of meetings in Berkeley, CA and the hotel that I’ve been staying in has spent the week doing one of those annoying things.

If you stay in pretty much any hotel today and you will find that they are making some token gestures towards environmental sustainability, usually you’ll find a card that needs to be put on the bed if you want the sheets changed and instructions in the bathroom suggesting that you hang up your towels in the morning and use them again.

I’m a big supporter of every small step that any organization takes in this regard, and the idea of hotels using a little less detergent or energy on a daily basis is a very good thing in my opinion.

At the same time though many hotels have not quite got their complete environmental sustainability agenda worked out.

A small (but frustrating to me) example in many hotels is the newspaper that sits on the floor outside of my room when I wake up in the morning, I never read it and I doubt many other guests read it either. Most of them probably pile up in a corner of the room until the day the guest checks out then they get thrown out.

Whenever this happens I’ll generally stop by the front desk and ask the hotel to stop delivering the daily paper… this place though, like a number of other hotels I’ve stayed in this year, agreed not to then when I opened the door the following morning there is ANOTHER newspaper sitting there.

If you’re staying in a hotel anywhere in the world then I’d ask that you join me in raising this with the management when it happens, we should push hotels to move forwards and complete the agenda of environmental sustainability that they have started with the linens in your room, but don’t yet seem to have worked out in other parts of their business.