Why should we use an eco hotel?

When I travel, I do not want to give up my priorities about how I live on this earth.

I want a small footprint.

I want to leave the world around me better because of my presence every day.

I want to add rather than detract from the workings of the earth and its living beings.

When I travel, I do not want to give up on my self care actions either.

The chemicals I am exposed to, the quality of my food and water, the quality of my sleep and my stress levels are all too important to me to yield to suboptimal lodgings when I travel.

Staying at an eco hotel makes my life and my wellness so much less stressful.

Most eco hotels are fully in line with my ideals about my living environment and they are well worth the tad bit of extra effort it takes to find them and book them.

Hotels often create a lot of wasted work, wasted energy and wasted resources.

Eco hotels take a holistic approach to minimizing their impact on the earth and their local environment.

They do more than just put a recycling bin in the lobby.

The last few trips that I've taken, I've purposely sought out eco hotels.

One of them has solar panels over the parking lot.

One of them was just camping.

One of them made sure to not have ice machines on every floor.

If you wanted ice you could just go ask the kitchen staff or the front desk for some ice.

But ice machine is actually a kind of a big deal.

It's loud, it requires space, it uses a lot of energy to create the ice and to keep it cold so that maybe someone tonight at the hotel will go get a little bit of ice.

It's a lot of wasted energy, it's wasted water and it's not usually that fresh either.

So hotel laundry.

Think about when you are at home.

Do you wash your sheets every day?

I hope not.

I hope you have better things to do with your time.

But at a hotel, at least most of the time.

When I was growing up, many places would change your sheets every night.

Very wasteful of water of the hotel staff time.

There's the issue of laundry detergent and whether or not that is eco friendly and especially when it goes into our oceans.

Hotels have a constant turnover of guests.

So when you have an eco hotel and they only wash your sheets at the end of your stay unless there's a problem while you're staying, a lot of water is saved, a lot of energy is saved and a lot of staff time is saved.

You shouldn't need fresh sheets, fresh new towels every day.

Yes, Sometimes things happen and you want an extra towel or you need some help cleaning something up.

That's what housekeeping is there for, to help you when you need them.

But you don't need more than you do at home.

You just might appreciate the extra hand of those places that I've stayed for my last few trips.

A big factor in whether or not I enjoyed the view out of the window of my room was how much lighting there was outside the hotel.

I stayed in one place where it was so environmentally friendly on the inside and very conscious about their energy usage and their water usage and their thermostat control for heating and cooling.

But when I looked out of the windows, all I saw was these bright lights.

Lights lighting up the building, lights lighting up the parking lots.

I know that the hotel wanted to be seen from the big road, but it creates a waste of energy.

It creates light pollution, it makes it hard to look at the stars, it makes it where the nighttime animals get very confused because it's never night if it's lit up all the time.

And it's stressful on our human eyes.

One of the important triggers that the human has from for going to sleep is when the light levels go down.

Yes, I know there are blackout curtains, but you shouldn't need them if you're trying to sleep at nighttime.

The moon should be the brightest light that there is.

Interior lighting and exterior lighting are both important for an eco hotel.

The interior lighting has to do with how bright are those hallways, how bright are the common areas at your own home in the middle of the night, you might have small night lights on, but you don't keep the hallways brightly lit just in case someone might wake up and need to walk around.

If you wake up and walk around, you might need to add light and that's fine.

But at a typical hotel, they've got the bright lights on the outside of the building and the bright lights on the inside.

And it's just wasteful and makes it hard to sleep.

So an eco hotel, the interior lighting will be dim, it'll be energy efficient, it'll be soft on the eyes, it will facilitate sleep.

Temperature control is another place where an eco hotel is different than a traditional hotel.

An eco hotel will try to facilitate fresh air coming in.

Your windows are likely to be able to open.

They're going to continue to keep a more constant temperature of the interior spaces in the hotel because that is the best energy efficient method.

So while you might want to come into your room and make an adjustment to the temperature, the adjustments are likely to be small because the eco hotel has already determined what tends to be comfortable temperatures from people who are there.

You can open the windows to heat or cool.

You can adjust the thermostat to heat or cool.

But if you walk out of your room, probably in an eco hotel, the heating and cooling system turns off.

You don't need to control the temperature for the human when the human has left.

Another place of importance when traveling and staying is food waste.

Whether it's a hotel, restaurant or a traditional restaurant, food waste is something that really bothers me.

Maybe it's because I've got strong relationships with my farmers that grow the food that sustains and nurtures me.

But I don't want food that has been created and grown by people and animals to just be thrown away because they made food and no one's eating it right now.

So one of the things that I look for at the eco hotels is how the restaurants handle food.

I'm looking for a slow food environment where they will make the food that I ask for and order right now fresh just for me.

It's not hanging around waiting.

If there's a buffet, I want to see it have small amounts of each choice and then it gets refilled so that the food is still fresh.

High quality and minimizing waste.

There's nothing sadder than looking at a buffet at the end of the night and having all that food get tossed most of the time.

In an eco hotel or an eco restaurant, serving sizes are fairly small, or at least small compared to the typical American oversized plates that you get at restaurants.

These small portions are better for digestion, portion control and cost.

Also, the eco hotels and eco restaurants are going to prioritize locally sourced food that's grown sustainably.

The food is simply going to be of a higher quality that makes my body and brain happy to hear.

Eco hotels are going to do their best job of cleaning the hotel, your space and the common spaces.

But they're going to use products that have a clean, fresh smell and work to actually clean without heavy fragrances, chemical outgassing, or other things that are toxic to your brain, body, pets and children.

If I walk into my room that has just been cleaned at an eco hotel, the smell is going to make me smile.

It's not going to give me a headache.

I'm not going to get a headache from walking past the house staff as they are going into the closet of supplies or coming out of a room they've just cleaned.

I know I'm safe at an eco hotel.

The cups that they have in the rooms for you to have some water with, they're going to be metal or glass.

They're not going to be plastic and paper.

We have enough exposure to plastic and paper that we don't have control over.

I like having control over this.

You'll find actual glasses, actual mugs and dishes to use.

No disposables.

Yes, you might need something disposable if you're taking it with you for the day.

But then at an eco hotel, you're likely to find some sustainably grown choices, maybe some bamboo, maybe 100% recycled products.

They will have your back at even this transportation and disposable nature.

I so much enjoy staying in eco hotels that I can guarantee on any retreat that I host, you will be sure that we are going to choose to stay in an ecologically minded place that meets my strict standards and hopefully yours too.