How green will a hotel go to get your business?

How about installing $175,000 in solar panels? When Marge Anderson, associate director of the Energy Center of Wisconsin, Madison, heard that Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells was considering a solar-powered water-heating system, she offered to ink a three-year deal for her Better Buildings, Better Business Conference, which attracts 800 to 1,000 attendees each year, in exchange for a promise of those solar panels.

The 740-room hotel agreed.

The solar installation is the biggest step in a partnership the Energy Center has been nurturing with Kalahari, which guzzles power as the home of a record-size indoor/outdoor waterpark in addition to 100,000 square feet of meeting space. Anderson, whose organization seeks solutions to energy challenges, started suggesting changes at the resort back in 2005. Three years later, the property estimates it saves about $400,000 a year in energy costs because of a wide variety of green initiatives egged on by Anderson, who includes green standards in her RFPs and BEOs and is planning to start including them in contracts. In return, Anderson guaranteed Kalahari her $150,000 a year meeting for the next three years.

Just Ask

Anderson, a well-known green meetings advocate, is not the only one including green practices in RFPs and even writing them into contracts. In fact, the general consensus of planners who attended the Greening the Hospitality Industry Conference in Vancouver this past February was, “‘Let's start asking for these things in the contract,’” says Victoria J. Stephens, CMP, founder and principal at Green Convene Strategies, a Denver-based meeting-management company that helps companies to incorporate green practices. “That way, two things can happen: We can hold the venue's feet to the fire, and the more we keep asking, the more change we are going to drive.”

Stephens found out the hard way that some hotels might need the pressure of a contract before taking green requests seriously. A year ago, a property had agreed verbally to provide a number of services for an event she was planning. But just two weeks out, they informed her that they would not provide recycling at the event, which was billed as being green, and left her scrambling to find the dollars and a vendor to do it. Since then, she includes minimum green practices in her contracts, with recycling, a linen reuse program, and measurement of results at the top of her list.

Even these basics can be difficult to include in a contract if the hotel doesn't already have the programs in place. “I don't think a planner is going to be able to request a fundamental change in the way that a property does business in a contract,” says James Goldberg, Corporate Meetings & Incentives' legal columnist, author of The Meeting Planner's Legal Handbook, and a principal at Washington, D.C., law firm of Goldberg & Associates PLLC. He suggests determining what environmental initiatives are important to your group, including those items in your RFP, and choosing a property based on the responses.

Julie Lindsey, director, corporate events at Gap Inc., San Francisco, uses an extensive checklist (see box, next page) in her hotel RFPs that includes everything from guest room infrastructure, such as water conservation and programmable thermostats, to service standards for banquets and treatment of food. “It covers pretty much every aspect of the hotel's operation and what their environmental standards are,” Lindsey says. “If the hotel agrees to it, it goes in the contract. It's the only way to make sure that everyone in the hotel knows what was agreed upon.”

Shannon McCorison, manager, global events at ProLogis, a Denver-based industrial real estate owner/developer, has found that hotels only start investigating how they will meet green requests when it is time to actually do it — and by then it may be too late. “Until you put it into a contract, it's really easy for a vendor to back out at the last minute.”

Gabrielle Davis, catering and convention services manager at the Westin Bayshore, Vancouver, recently signed her first contract that includes green services. Agreeing to sustainable practices is no problem for her, though — her property is well ahead of the curve, having launched a guest room recycling program in 1993. Now, if a meeting planner shows interest in sustainability, she offers a whole green section for the contract, including items such as paperless check-in and check-out and bulk condiment service. “We're thrilled that planners are starting to request these items,” she says.

How Far Is Too Far?

Because contracts imply penalties, some hotels might not be willing to go as far as these planners insist, says Goldberg. “If you try to put in some remedy, hotels will reject those kinds of things.”

Jenny Baird, senior sales manager, green meetings specialist at the Doubletree Hotel & Executive Meeting Center Portland-Lloyd Center, agrees that financial penalties tied to green services might be difficult to write into a contract, although she is confident enough in her property's green credentials that she would consider including them. (No planner has requested them yet.)

However, at least one planner has had success with penalties. Nancy Wilson, CMP, principal at Meeting Strategies Worldwide, Portland, Ore., another well-known green meetings advocate, holds back the last 10 percent of the payment until the property has complied with everything she wanted at her event, including the green standards. And she will walk away from a property that will not include that penalty in the contract.

“For some clients, this is incredibly important to them,” notes Wilson, who has had to exercise that penalty when a property did not deliver.

Checks and Balances

Once the RFP has been agreed upon and the contract signed, how do you make sure that the hotel follows through with what it promised? One strategy that McCorison has come up with is to ask housekeeping to keep a checklist of which rooms requested linen re-use. This serves a double purpose: She is able to see how much water and energy her group saved while ensuring that housekeeping staff pays attention to guests' requests. She also asks that the hotel's operations department get involved right from the start. “Catering and sales don't know how to measure,” she says. “Operations needs to measure everything. It's hard to know what they know until you're sitting in a room with them.”