The name of the game in 2020 is #sustainability. These days, sustainability is not just a travel buzzword. It's an issue consumers care about. The statistics are here to back that up. According to a recent survey of millennials, 87 percent would be more loyal to an organization that helps them contribute to social and environmental causes. Sustainable tourism will eventually be essential to achieving growth and satisfying guests as more consumers seek out green businesses and pay extra for eco-friendly products and services.
More than 25% of hotels still use pen and paper to manage their properties in the US. The waste this creates is staggering – averages of just over three kilograms of unsorted waste per guest, per night. In an era of astonishing technological advances, relying on paper for your day-to-day business seems not just old-fashioned, but wasteful as well. From plastic straws to disposable cups, the environmental sins of the hospitality industry have made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Hotels continue to damage the environment through the usual offenders such as unnecessary packaging and energy usage as well as the waste that comes from the endless paper receipts, registration cards and invoices that reception desks keep churning out; ancient practices that are ripe for digitalization.
Technology is here to help reduce waste, why don’t more Hotels explore biodegradable alternatives and more environmentally friendly digital processes?
Smart hotel chains are paying attention and changing their operations to decrease their impact on the environment. As a reward, hotels have realized that ‘going green’ can be a clever marketing plan as well—receiving free press and promotion about their sustainability efforts during annual rankings. Also, expect to save a good deal by reducing your energy and water consumption, as well as staffing for maintenance and guest services. By going green, Hotels will do less damage to the environment, lower costs, and win goodwill from guests. And thanks to new hotel technology, it’s more than feasible to achieve these.
Hotels have been making strides to becoming more environmentally without breaking the bank. Are you ready to make a proactive environmental decision to reduce paper usage through mobile apps and digitalization and save the planet?
More than 5 billion people use a mobile phone, that's equivalent to roughly two-thirds of the world’s population. Every business needs to adapt with its audience, therefore many hotels have developed their own smartphone apps for their customers to enjoy. Through which, customers can order food, sign up for excursions, write reviews and suggestions; all at their fingertips. Intelligent hotel technology is here to stay. A few years ago, the idea of controlling all aspects of the guestroom from your smartphone was only a really cool idea. In 2020, all the largest hotel brands are rolling out room controls that enable guests to select the room temperature, lighting mood, TV, music, blinds and more. This level of personalization has never been possible before and will transform both the guest experience and optimize energy consumption while saving thousands of dollars for the hotel.
A fully functional touchscreen tablet would be the next obvious step, as it has more features that could be utilized to positively influence the guest experience. Hotel room tablets can effectively replace all printed materials by providing a digital vault of information that can be immediately updated or edited. Changes to menus, prices, event schedules, and policies can all be made immediately by staff and accessed immediately by guests. This saves the need to reprint the same things over and over for simple changes. Let's be real, printing is expensive!
Smart guest apps like TripKit offer tools that help hotels meet their guests’ needs, making their stay special and sustainable by eliminating the need to print menus, catalogues, leaflets and other paper based marketing material that hotels need to sell their services. Using the digital device, hotels can reduce (or eliminate) the use of paper—saving tons of water and chemicals used in paper processing.
As the advances in technology are serving to allow hoteliers to focus on spending more time with their guests and increasingly use those real hospitality skills, while only the boring and repetitive manual tasks get automated in the background by tech solutions like TripKit they will not only reduce waste but also save time and resources.
The future is paperless. We will eventually stop buying and producing paper that is used once and discarded. Hotels still relying heavily on paper usage must consider better alternatives to keep pace with evolving technology and offer their guests a more engaging and interactive experience. Investing in these eco-friendly technologies and techniques will help you save your costs as well as the environment. As inhabitants of this planet, we should take responsibility for it and do our part in making it better – not worse.