August
Green tourism is defined as general travel going greener. Going green has been recently getting more and more popular, now hotels, airlines, and tourist hot spots are getting greener to help save the environment. The largest industries in the world are both trying to shrink tourism’s environmental footprint while still expanding their ventures, although many of the industries believe that their efforts will not have any effect on the current global warming crisis at hand.
The problem with global warming is that the Earth’s air and the oceans are gradually heating up. We can ignore it now but in the future it is going to be a genuine problem because it is getting worse every year. The part of global warming that is caused by travel has a lot to do with ecotourism or, traveling to places having unspoiled natural resources, with minimal impact on the environment being the primary concern.
Something that could help this is using biofuel in place of kerosene because it would not affect the environment so harshly. Flying is becoming the most efficient way for people to travel these days because it is faster and cheaper than driving or taking a boat to get where you need to go. When testing to see if biofuel would suffice as a replacement to kerosene, hundreds of people gathered for the event with promising results. In reality, there was only one engine on that tested 747 using the biofuel which had been mixed with 25% of kerosene jet fuel, but it was still very meaningful to those people who gathered to watch. Many citizens were glad that important people were starting to see that global warming was happening, instead of turning a blind eye as they had been for quite some time. This would greatly improve our situation with the environment because we would not be burning so much kerosene in the atmosphere.
Many big name hotels such as Marriot and Hilton are also putting on their green hats and making alterations to the hotels to go green. Some of these alterations include recycling all paper products, changing the light bulbs, setting AC in the lobby and other public places in the hotel to a set degree and never changing it, and fixing automatic toilets to allow a certain amount of water to flush when the sensor is triggered. Marriot alone expects to lower GHG emissions (green house gas emissions) 2.2 million pounds by 2010. In addition to international Marriott’s, Accor’s hotels in France will all have solar panels in their hotels by 2010. These changes to hotels will help the environment because we are using less light, less water, less energy through lowering the AC or heat, recycling, and lowering the rate of those harmful green house gases barreling through the atmosphere.
Tourist hot spots are even said to be going green, making traveling easier on everyone’s conscious and just being better all around. Some tourism properties are participating in the Cayman Islands Environmental Project for the Tourism Sector. This project believes that every little alteration can make a big difference on the environment. The program is made to save at work and, hopefully, it will change the staff’s decision making in their own homes. They have decided to use energy saving light bulbs and have properties achieve the Green Global 21 Certification, a decent award for “greening” their properties. Like hotels, the tourist hotspots are starting to become big with saving as much water, power, and energy in everyday places, furthering the development of a greener earth.
Photo by: Natalia Bratslavsky -
Fotolia
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I am excited to see people blogging on Green Tourism! I’ve been using http://www.EnvironmentallyFriendlyHotels.com/ to find out how a hotel is going green! They list a hotels green features all the way down to if they compost!
Excited to see more establishments taking notice and implementing pro green policy!
I think its great that corporate hotel chains such as the Marriot and Hilton Hotels that you mentioned are looking into green practices within their operations. One of the big green issues with larger hotel chains though, is through the leakage of employment and product funds back to the hotel chain headquarters. Instead of buying local products and training local residents to take on higher level employment opportunities within the hotels, many hotels will choose to fly in their operational products (food, towels, building materials, etc) and Hotel Management employees. This not only means that the main profit from the hotels is leached back to the hotels base country (reducing the host country’s tourism profit), but by not employing local and using local, they are increasing their carbon footprints, reducing local employment diversity and resident skill retention and negatively impacting the cultural attraction of the destination. Locals tend to turn to market and small store employment, creating local arts and crafts for the tourists, but this can also lead to loss of culture through exploitation of these traditional arts. The best way to go green when you travel is to look for locally owned hotels that source their products from the destination area. That way you know that the hotel owners are aware of the local area and put the destination first. I remember visiting Tobago a few years ago and one such corporate hotel chain had built its newest hotel right on Turtle Beach, a local breeding ground for turtles. The bright lights of the hotel disorientated the turtles laying eggs on the beach, so they were unable to find the ocean easily after coming ashore (they use moonlight on the water to direct themselves back to the ocean and hotel lights at night create an effect similar to the natural moonlight, so cause the disorientation), and very few local residents were employed in high ranking roles at the hotel - they had all been flown in from the States. They advertised themselves as an eco-destination resort, but caused more damage than green. In comparison, the eco lodge I stayed at in Castara Bay was built and run using local materials and employed a full local Tobagan staff. They advised us of where to visit and how to visit with the least impact possible - down to not using sunscreen in the water to protect the coral reefs. Its one thing to put a sign in the bathroom asking guests to use their towels twice to save water, but to really go green, start from the bottom up. Appreciate and understand the needs of the local area before building the hotel, use locally sourced products and a local workforce, and if you are the guest, choose the hotel that doesn’t ship in everything from towels and tomatoes to management staff, its the only way to really go green when you travel.
I hope that everyone can start thinking green. We really need to help our planet renew it’s self it have been abused for so many years.
In defense of the hotel industry. Staying quite a few hotels and motels over the course of the year as part of my job. I have noticed that more of them are asking if you require clean sheets every day or if you’re prepared to have your sheets changed less frequently, with a little note explaining how many loads of laundry this saves a year. I don’t think most people change the sheets every day at home. I know I certainly don’t. I know that the motel chains are interested as much in their bottom line as they are in going green but it is still a step in the right direction.