Mr. Tatum

Eco-Friendly Practices

Your Environmental Policy, An Untapped Asset (Part II)

By Tyler Tatum, Marketing Strategy Consultant,

In the first part of this series, we helped you create a document outlining your environmental policy, which you and your team can use as a point of reference for direction as well as articulating your efforts to guests. In tracking your savings, it will be important to reference this document in order to better understand the source of the savings. For example, if your property is experiencing a large reduction in water usage, but your environment policy identifies no efforts related to water reduction; your team is clearly missing some important information. Either you have forgotten to include key water saving initiatives your property has implemented, or some other factor has changed.

You may notice the use the singular term "property" instead of plural term "properties". Due to differences in environmental conditions, clientele, individual property occupancy, and other related factors, it is important to look at the impact of your environmental policy at the level of each individual property. For those who have multiple properties, you can sum your overall efforts; however, ignoring the individual property differences may cause you to make global decisions without vital information. For example, in a hotel next to a national park, guests may be highly sensitized to environmental issues such that your overall impact may be less than a property implementing changes in the middle of New York City.

Referencing how you are marketing your environmental efforts will become important information in tracking and understanding the overall impact of your efforts on metrics such as sales and guests satisfaction. Without a clear understanding of the changes you are making in your behaviors, you will have a hard time understanding the metrics representing the results of your changes. For example, you will have to include any changes in your sales and marketing efforts in your interpretation of your sales figures.

Once you have created your environmental policy, there are three key metrics in assessing the impact of your environment policy. 1) Understanding your performance prior to implementing changes, 2) estimating the impact of your property's efforts, and 3) matching your estimates to your actual. In reviewing these three metrics, each must be broken into two main categories: overall impact on sales (or heads in beds) and overall impact on operations.

First, we will investigate how to measure and track your policy's impact on sales. In order to understand your past revenue performance, it will be important to retrieve the last twelve months of revenue per available room (Rev PAR) data, as well as the overall occupancy rates. Take these numbers and plot them on a graph (this is easy to do using Excel or just a sheet of paper). Mark where your hotel had lower or higher occupancy during the year. Identify your Rev PAR and occupancy for the year, and draw these numbers on the graph.

Next, use your understanding of how you are marketing your environmental policy to help you identify what the impact on overall sales might be. For example, assume you ran an ad including your environmental efforts in the local media, and 10% of your guests come from the local community. A doubling of traffic from your advertising efforts would only increase occupancy rates by approximately 10%. In looking at future performance, it will be important to use this information in order to understand if any change did occur. If you are marketing through any of the environmental organizations such as the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) or the Environment Protection Agency's Energy Star program, call them and ask how other hotels have been effected from there efforts.

Understanding your current customer base is an important part of this effort. If you do not have a good idea of where your customers are coming from, then pull the sales information from a particularly busy month and count the key metrics of interest as they relate to your marketing efforts. If this is too complicated, then begin today counting key metrics for the next month. This information will not only help you understand your efforts to market your environmental policy, it will also help you understand where you can gain the maximum return from your environmental marketing.

The third key metric is your actual performance once your new marketing initiatives are in place. Begin by looking at the average Rev PAR and occupancy for the most recent month. Compare this number to the previous years averages and the corresponding month for the previous year. If you see differences, us your estimates above as well as whatever detail you have of the breakdown in your revenue to understand this change. Like using a magnifying glass, you may need to zoom in and out until you have the right amount of detail to understand the change in your revenue numbers.

If possible, it is important to realize the impact of your environmental efforts on sales and use your new understanding to adjust your marketing in the future.

A qualitative way to understand the impact of your efforts on your guests is to survey them. You can either use a survey card in the room, or include a survey in the materials you give to guests with their room key. This may also increase the exposure of your environmental program. Some key questions are:

Surveying your guests is the best way to truly understand the impact of your efforts. Even if only a small fraction of your guests fill out the information, you can gain valuable insight from their comments.

Surveying your employees as to what they feel the guests' response has been is another way to gain some great insight into the programs impact. Make sure to interview all staff from the front desk to the housekeeping crew. You may be surprised as to who has the most insight into the guest's experience.

An easier step in the process is to look at how your efforts are impacting your operational costs. Again, it will be important to track past performance, estimate the impact of your efforts, and investigate your current performance since implementing your environmental policy. A few resources I have mentioned previously are the EPA Energy Star (www.EnergyStar.gov/hospitality) website and your state or local pollution prevention agency (http://www.epa.gov/p2/resources/statep2.htm). These resources will provide you with calculation tools that not only will help you understand past performance, but also will give you insight into the impact of your efforts.

Regardless of what tool you decide to use, you will need to pull out your energy, water, and waste bills for the past 12 months. Graph these metrics by month, and include a line across the entire graph for the yearly averages. You may want to create a separate graph that includes these numbers divided by the monthly occupancy numbers.

Once you understand how your property has performed in the past, you can move on to understand the estimated impact of your environmental efforts. Begin by looking at the list of environmental changes you have implemented. For each initiative, you should be able to find information on its potential impact from the manufacturer (if it is a product or service), from the Energy Star website, from your local pollution prevention agency, or from various other related resources. If you fail to find the information at these locations, make your best guess. For example, if you had 4 gallons per minute (GPM) showerheads, you changed to 2.5 GPM showerheads, the average shower is 10 minutes long, and the average customer takes one shower per day, the impact of this change should be around 15 gallons per occupied room per day.

Now, use these estimates to understand what is really happening. When you get your next set of bills for the month, check to see how they compare to previous months. See if you are getting the savings you expected from the initiatives you implemented. It may take you a few months of reviewing the numbers to really understand your impact.

When at Project Planet, I found it very helpful to just ask the staff how they described the impact of the Project Planet program. Where appropriate, you can do the same. Many of your staff's assessments may be more qualitative than quantitative; however, you can always back their understanding of the problem with real data. For example, you may ask the front desk if complaints about a lack of hot water have decreased after implementing reduced flow showerheads. You may find that housekeeping is not seeing the laundry pile up since implementing a linens and towels reuse program. Maintenance staff may notice a large reduction in the amount of garbage in the dumpster since implementing a compost program.

A friend of mine once said to understand a problem, you must understand the numbers. Measuring and tracking the impact of your environmental policy, no matter how simple or sophisticated your system, will lead you to much success in promoting the program to guests, staff, owners, franchisers, and managers.

Tyler Tatum Marketing Strategy Consultant who maximizes clients potential with the best marketing strategy at the least cost. As General Manager of Project Planet, Mr. Tatum pursued a passion for the environment. The focus was to save saving his clients money, while reducing their environmental impact. To maximize the program, Mr. Tatum had to create excitement among hotel staff and guests while maintaining the best guest experience. While with Project Planet, Mr. Tatum increased the program by over fifty percent. He also launched three new regional designs. Mr. Tatum can be contacted at 404-783-0923 or TylerTatum@Bellsouth.net Extended Bio...

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