How You Can be an Environmentally Friendly Hotel Guest

The running of a large hotel, with its huge amount of hotel supplies and energy use, can have a fairly large negative impact on the environment. This has lead to a growing number of hotels looking to become more environmentally friendly and marketing themselves as green hotels.

Although it is more common, there is still a lot of progress that can be made. When it comes down to it though, it is up to us as hotel guests to ensure we have as little impact as possible on our environment.

By personally thinking about the resources you use, you can make a difference. Think about things like hotel linen, by using less you can help even if you aren’t staying in a green hotel. Here are some other things:

1) Turn off anything in your room that you are not using, don’t go out for the day leaving the air con or the TV on. There are many people who abuse this, simply because they are not footing the electrical bill.

2) Bring a plug in night light from home and use this instead of leaving the room light on all night.

3) You can’t do much if they don’t recycle, but if the hotel offers it use the service.

4) You will likely have access to a complimentary newspaper at the hotel. Don’t bin it when you have finished with it, try and pass it on to someone else or recycle it. Ask the hotel staff about a recycling scheme or, depending on where you are, bring it home and recycle it yourself.

5) Take an opened hotel soaps home with you. If you keep the wrapper it comes in this can be done easily. It isn’t about being cheap (although it will save you cash) it is just unnecessary throw away soap. By using the soap it saves you buying more.

6) Use water the way that you probably do at home when you pay for it. Don’t have unnecessarily long showers and brush your teeth with the tap running.

7) Almost any hotel will have a large number of tourist brochures; don’t take them just because they are there. Only take ones that you will read. You can even return ones you have used to the rack instead of dropping them in a bin somewhere. This is a waste of paper.

8) My pet hate is people who go mad at free buffets. Why take more food than you are going to eat? Feel free to overeat because its free, everyone is entitled to a treat. Just don’t take more than you can eat and waste it.

9) Bring your own reusable mug rather than using several disposable plastic ones.

You can even ask the hotel not to change your sheets and towels every day. It isn’t particularly necessary to do this, hotels just do it as part of their service, as a courtesy. While some may be hesitant to break from policy, others should understand your requirements.

As you can see, a lot of these use common sense. I like to think about everything in terms of how I act at home. Where I have to pay for things I rarely waste them. You would be surprised at what a big difference a lot of little things can make, it adds up.