I’m spending the weekend playing Hoppa-Hoppa-Reiter* with my 7-months-old in a Washington hotel. (* Ask my mom. She started it.) They are doing all the right things here.
The toilet is of the high-intensity, low-water kind. The bulbs are CFLs. Towels aren’t washed unless you drop them on the floor. In short, they are doing all the right things that save the hotel money and make guests feel good about doing good without having to do anything about it.
That’s where things stop, as they do in most hotels.
The TV is flat, wide, and always on stand-by because, well, guests like it that way. The AC is on full blast when you walk in. There’s always a line of cabs outside, even though the next metro stop is a block away. The hotel figures, probably correctly, that business travelers don’t do public transport. Why would you, if you can expense the cab?
Most importantly, the water and energy saved from reusing your towels pales compared with the energy it takes to get you to the hotel in the first place—whether it’s a car from across the Potomac, a train from New York, or a flight from San Francisco.
That’s the part no hotel would ever touch. Telling people not to show up to yet another conference isn’t quite in their interest. And volunteering not to show up to the conference will do nothing for the planet. It’ll just make you look stupid in front of your boss.
