With new eco-friendly gadgets on the market, there has never been a better time to make your hotel environmentally friendly
Travellers’ increasing awareness of green issues has encouraged the region’s hotels to adopt a more eco-friendly approach to business. And with the introduction of new green technology, there has never been a better time for hoteliers to improve on their hotel’s eco-credentials.
Tom Lord, hotel manager of InterContinental Dubai Festival City — which has just installed LED lighting from Philips — says now is the time to invest in environmentally friendly technology.
“There is a definite shift in a lot of corporate business towards responsible business, corporate social responsibility, and so on. So if you’re a hotel in the Middle East — or indeed anywhere in the world — your clients now want you to be greener, but I think it’s also aligned with the fact that the hotel industry is only going the same way as everybody else,” Lord says.
“We are all moving towards awareness of the environment and the fact that there do need to be some changes, but also the fact that there are some fantastic green solutions out there right now means that you would be crazy not to look in to them,” he adds.
Real Savings
But will the introduction of modern ‘green’ technology truly make a difference to the environment?
Louis Hakim, chairman of Philips Middle East and VP Royal Philips Electronics, believes that using new technology means that hotels do not need to resort to a complete overhaul of their building system in order to be more eco-friendly.
“LED lighting solutions consume less power compared to conventional lighting systems, yet give the same lighting output and generate less heat,” Hakim says.
“LED bulbs use 20% of the power of the current incandescent bulbs and last up to 25,000 hours, compared with 1000 hours for a standard bulb and 8000 for a CFL. That’s 17 years if the bulb is switched on for four hours a day. Hotels often have the lights in common areas on for most of the time,” he adds.
Solutions such as LED lighting are a far cry from larger-scale solutions such as solar panels, which have traditionally been perceived as the pinnacle of green buildings, but, says Lord, it is not necessary to adopt such solutions, as the smaller things can make a big difference.
“I think that changing existing items to more energy efficient offerings, such as using LED lighting, will be more practical and get done a lot more quickly than trying to install solar panels to run a hotel that’s been stood there for 20 years — you’ve got to be realistic about this — if you were planning to run a hotel entirely out of solar you would need a significant number of solar panels, and once your hotel has already been built, it is difficult to install,” Lord asserts.
Tarek Zakaria, ABB’s intelligent building system manager for the Gulf region, says that the use of energy efficient technology can have several desirable effects.
“First what you will have is a guest who appreciates what the hotel and the chain is doing to reduce its energy and water consumption. Many guests do want companies to promote the ‘go green’ initiative by adopting solutions that would increase comfort and also have less impact on the environment,” he says.
“A second reason why we do believe people care, even indirectly, is because of cost. If a hotel is saving 30% on energy costs, they could pass this on to the customer. It doesn’t take much to work out that people will be happier if the cost of a service is reduced, especially if there’s little distinction between comparable services, say for example two five-star hotels,” adds Zakaria.
Rajeev Abraham, buildings solutions manager — hotels, Schneider Electric EMEA, agrees that hoteliers are looking at the added benefit of the cost saving that comes with reducing energy consumption.
“Hotels have a sharp eye on return on capital investment; ideally it should be about 36-42 months. Therefore any form of energy management that can provide this kind of ROI becomes interesting to hoteliers,” he says.
The savings that hotels could stand to make could have a significant impact on their bottom line, Zakaria confirms.
“According to a study in 2009 conducted by energy consultancy firm Farnek Avireal, a typical five-star hotel in Dubai has a total energy bill of up to AED 7 million (US$1.9m) a year. With ABB technology these costs can be reduced drastically by making energy usage more efficient,” he states.
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
