Rockhouse Hotel: $125/nt & up
The Caves: $445/nt & up
The West End Cliffs in Negril, Jamaica are among the most ruggedly beautiful places on earth, with spectacular sunsets and a handful of lovely eco-boutiques that seem to grow out of the rock. The chicest and best known of these eco boutiques is The Caves, a member of the Island Outpost hotel group (which also includes swank properties Geejam and Goldeneye). With 11 unique, private cottages, locally-focused cuisine, and intimate service, The Caves certainly is a spectacular place — but it’s hardly the only game in town. You can get almost identical experiences at both Rockhouse Hotel and Tensing Pen, for a third of the price.
Below, we’ll break down what all three hotels have to offer. Do you think the Caves is worth the splurge, or do Rockhouse and Tensing Pen deliver more for the money? Let us know in the comments section. Read More »
The toilet-top sinks at the Good Hotel conserve water with each flush.
These days, almost every hotel asks guests to save the planet by reusing their towel. But a growing number of properties are taking their environmental friendliness way beyond the bare minimum: Eco initiatives like graywater systems, cooking oil recycling, and — one of our favorites– toilet-top sinks, are paving the way for a greener future in the hospitality industry. Below, we’ve outlined ingenious eco initiatives that the average hotel guest has probably never heard of — yet.
Related articles: LEED-certified hotels; Eco-conscious design in Jamaica
Toilet-top sinks: Although water-efficient measures like low-flow toilets, showers and faucets are becoming increasingly common ( you can find them at the Residence Inn Washington, D.C. , the Crosby Street Hotel, and the Lenox Hotel, among others), Good Hotel in San Francisco has implemented one of the most inventive water-efficient fixtures we’ve ever seen: A toilet-top sink. Each flush prompts a stream of clean water from the toilet-top faucet, which flows for a full minute and drains into the bowl to be used for the next flush.
Staff uniforms made from recycled bottles: We love it when hotels use recycled materials, like the pillows made from old hotel blankets at the Good Hotel, the disposable cups made from compostable corn at the Fairmont Kea Lani Maui, and the recycled teak wood furnishings at the Nu Hotel. Ritz-Carlton Kapalua even dresses some of its employees in recycled materials: Uniforms for the front of house staff at the are made from recycled bottles.
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The Geejam boutique hotel in Port Antonio, Jamaica was designed to meld with its natural surroundings.
Most hotels’ eco initiatives relate to things they do, like using chemical-free cleaning products, low-flow toilets, or energy-efficient lighting. But occasionally, we encounter that special breed of hotel that is green not necessarily because of what it does, but because of what it is — a hotel specifically designed to minimize its impact on the environment. Below, check out our favorite hotels with eco-conscious design in Jamaica.
For more green hotels, check out our previous post on LEED-certified hotels. Read More »
The Palazzo, one of the largest hotels in the country to receive LEED certification, uses a solar heating system for its swimming pools.
A lot of hotels claim to environmentally-friendly, but how is an eco-conscious traveler to know what hotels are truly green, and which are green-washed — purporting to be green for good press, without making significant efforts? With so many types of eco initiatives and so many organizations granting green certification, it can be extremely difficult to figure out what’s real, and what’s just branding. To help you make informed decisions, we’re launching a new series to explain the various eco initiatives that hotels take — including recycling, water efficiency, and energy conservation programs — and we’ll spotlight a couple of great hotels that really go the extra mile in each category. Of course, succeeding at one initiative does not a green hotel make, and at the end of the day, a hotel is sometimes more part of the problem than the solution. But we think it’s worth pointing out which hotels are making good-faith efforts to change that, one step at a time.
That being said, there are a few hotels that are truly green all around — those that have been certified by the prestigious Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. Submitting a hotel for LEED consideration is prohibitively expensive for some smaller properties, and only a precious few that can afford it actually make the grade — only a couple dozen in the United States have been certified so far. But if you want to feel completely confident you’re making an environmentally-conscious choice, booking a LEED hotel is the way to go. Check out our list of LEED-certified hotels reviewed by Oyster after the jump.
Soap at JW Marriott Grande Lakes, a hotel participating with Clean the World
Oyster recently caught wind of a creative project that intrigued the Earth-lover in us.
We all know that one of the best parts of a hotel stay is leaving with a suitcase full of free mini shampoo bottles and soap bars. But what happens to all of the slightly used toiletries you leave behind in the shower? They go to waste – about 1 million soap bars each year wind up in landfills, according to Treehugger.com.
Clean the World is trying to end the wastefulness and save some lives in the process. The non-profit collects and sterilizes opened bars of hotel soap and redistributes them (along with shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and bath gel) to some of the world’s poorest countries and to homeless shelters in the United States. Each year, 3.5 million people around the world die from diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory illness, and many of those deaths can be prevented by hand washing with basic bar soap.
Some 100 hotels are currently donating their slightly-used soap to Clean the World. We hope more hotels get on board. (Here’s how.)
Toiletries at JW Marriott Grande Lakes, a hotel participating with Clean the World
by admin on November 17, 2009
The SinkPositive system, Good Hotel
File under “Things That Are Awesome”: We encountered this toilet-top sink during our stay at the quirky, eco-friendly Good Hotel in San Francisco and we’re digging the whole concept — you might even say we were so jazzed by the idea of it that our faces were a bit flushed (ha!) when we walked out of the bathroom.
Here’s the deal: When you flush a toilet outfitted with the SinkPositive system, a stream of clean water flows from the toilet-top sink faucet. It flows for one minute, allowing you to wash your hands without ever touching the tap. That greywater then flows off your hands and drains down into the toilet bowl to be used for the next flush.
SinkPositive system
The good news: you don’t have to expose yourself to germs by turning the faucet on and off before and after rinsing your hands. The better news: the limited stream of water reminds you to make the effort to wash your paws and dispenses only enough water needed to effectively clean both hands. The best news: the water is efficiently reused for the next toilet flush.
According to the sign (left), this little contraption can help each user save a gallon of potable water per day, and the leak detector on the device helps prevent additional water waste (not-so-fun fact: did you know U.S. toilet leaks alone account for over 12% of the nation’s water supply?)
Not a bad initiative for hoteliers to consider — nor a particularly expensive one: the SinkPositive system (shown here) runs $109.00 per fixture. Some hotels spend more than that on throw pillows. Just saying.
by admin on October 5, 2009
Despite what the Starwood exec says below, the Westin New York at Times Square claims to recycle
The New York Times ran a story today attempting to explain the question many of us ask each time we resign ourselves to pitching empty water bottles into the single wastebaskets provided beneath our hotel room desks: uh, would it be so hard to drop a recycling bin here?
It seems the answer is more complicated than you might think. Adding a recycling program to a hotel involves more than just throwing a pretty-colored bin into a guest room — well, some hotel execs tell the NYT so, at least:
“It’s challenging,” said Brian McGuinness, a senior vice president at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which offers in-room recycling at its Element hotels and plans to introduce similar programs at other brands by the end of 2010. “These initiatives sound easy in theory, but in practice it’s quite a different story.”
Housekeeping carts have to be modified to keep recycled materials separate from other trash, workers have to be trained in new procedures that may involve union negotiations and the recyclables often have to be sorted and stored at the hotel before being taken away — but not too far away.
Mr. McGuinness said Starwood required that the recycling center “be within a 50-mile radius of any given property” and noted that some Starwood properties would therefore be exempt from the requirement. “Otherwise, we’re hauling recycling materials in a truck burning fuel for 80 miles.”
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