Hospitality Forever

Hospitality Forever is a handbook for the person in the hospitality industry who wants to make money, save money, and do the right thing: in other words, the person who wants to run a sustainable business in an environmentally sustainable way. It is for the resort operator, facility manager, or tour director who needs some solid tools for enhancing the environmental effects of his/her resort, facility, or tour. Based on real-world examples in both the developing and developed world, this book contains practical discussions, case studies, templates, checklists and protocols, resource lists, implementation tips, specific examples, diagrams and flow charts to help implement a comprehensive system of principles, processes, and practices to help you achieve environmental sustainability. When I told a friend over dinner recently that I was working on a book about the hospitality industry, she put down her fork, leaned over the table, and said, “Do you know what I just hate? It’s those hotels with the little laundry hang tags, telling me that if I do such-and-such they won’t wash my linens. They lie! I do exactly what they tell me to, and they wash my linens anyway! What a waste of effort!” I couldn’t agree more. It is a waste of effort, and of time, of money, of water and energy and labor resources, of good will, of opportunity. And notice: she doesn’t hate the tags, she hates the hotel, because its management enlisted her help and then failed to keep their part of the bargain. Here she was, a happy customer, willing and able to help the hotel work toward a worthwhile goal which she shares and is emotionally committed to – saving the environment – and they failed to keep their side of the agreement. Here’s what this one small “hang tag” problem costs you, the hotel operator, tour director, or cruise boat captain, every day:  By not following through on your promises, you are wasting all the money you spent on hang tags.  By continuing to wash linens in spite of what your guests tell you they want, you are failing to earn any savings on energy, water, detergent, labor or linen replacement costs that washing fewer linens daily can provide.  By violating the trust of your best customers, the ones who are willing to do something extra to help you succeed, you are squandering their good will, perhaps forever.  And if you don’t use hang tags at all, you are missing out on all their benefits. And here are the longer-term implications of this one little situation for your enterprise:  You apparently didn’t learn from these failures, or even notice they were occurring, so did not take any corrective action to improve your behavior over time.  You apparently did not take the trouble to train (or retrain) the staff, or develop a procedure that was easy for them to follow, or create incentives for following it.  You apparently have no way to set or measure costs, earnings, return on investment, management objectives and targets, effectiveness of staff training, overall performance, quality of service, regulatory compliance, adaptability of procedures, impacts to the environment, staff efficiency and teamwork, how well you keep your promises, contribution to the community, progress toward sustainability.... One could come to believe you simply don’t care about your customers, your environment, your employees, your business, your community, or your planet, because it seems you have made no systematic and sustained effort to protect, enhance, or care for any of them. It’s a wonder you are still in business! In fact, in the context of business and environmental sustainability, this simple and all-too-common situation with hang tags is a symptom of a major operational failure at the practice, process, and principle levels:  Practice level: The hang tag practice failed and was not either revamped or replaced with something more effective.  Process level: You failed to set objectives, develop a procedure to meet them, train the staff, identify the problem when it arose, fix the problem when it was identified, learn from your mistakes, revise your objectives and retrain the staff, or monitor the system that is supposed to carry out your environmental policy. Maybe you don’t even have an environmental policy.  Principle level: You failed to develop or apply high-level principles to running your enterprise: How do you know you’ve made a good decision? How do you choose which to implement first, among competing “best practices”? Who are you, as a business? How do you operate in your community? Is it OK with you lie to your best customers? Do you want to have a company that can fail in this way, or do you want a self-correcting learning organization based on shared fundamental principles? What would sustainability look like, if you were to decide to go there? All of this, of course, is the subject of this book. By the end you will have a good idea of why sustainability matters and why you should care. I will review some major hospitality industry “Best Practices” of today (we’ll all be inventing tomorrow’s together), and give you some checklists and protocols for determining which ones you want to apply to your operations. You’ll also get a set of step-by-step tools for developing an environmental management system that will keep your processes robust and effective. And you’ll learn a set of science-based guiding principles to use as a compass along your pathway to business and environmental sustainability, and how to apply them to building the kind of business that will endure in the 21st century. Wherever you are on the path, whether you are wondering if it’s worthwhile to begin or whether you are well underway, you and your enterprise can benefit from the practical tools in this handbook.