For all media and pr enquiries please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Previous press:
Click below to go directly to the article.
Financial Times, Apr 21 2008
Serge The Concierge, Apr 22 2008
Tourist Destinations, Apr 22 2008
Planet Green, May 9 2008
Intelligent Travel from National Geographic Traveler, May 22 2008
Travelblog.it (in Italian), May 27 2008
Panorama.it (in Italian), June 6 2008
Ecoblog.it (in Italian), June 8 2008
The Alternative Consumer, July 9 2008

FT REPORT - RESPONSIBLE TRAVELLER 2008: Eco-hotels thin on the ground
By Jill James
Published: Apr 21, 2008

There are plenty of hotels scattered around the world that are anxious to shout their green credentials. Alas, for the business traveller there are painfully few to choose from.

When faced with business in Rotterdam or Beijing, green choices are extremely limited. The travel press bombards us with information on eco-friendly hotels and spas, but the chances of finding one in a business centre, rather than on the edge of a rain forest or in some exotic, palm-fringed resort, are almost nil.

As Alex Conti, director of Eco Hotels of the World, says: "Choosing an eco-friendly hotel is absolutely fine if you want to see turtles hatching, but if you're trying to find one in a business location it is another matter."

Part of the problem is that city centre hotels are often planned and built by developers. Hotel operators come into the process much later * usually after planning approval * and by then it is too late to have real input on green specifications and technology. Short-termism is another factor - today's cheapest option is probably not the long-term green one, and by tomorrow, financial directors and managers have moved on.

Mr Conti reckons business travellers who want an environmentally sound hotel face two problems: first their choice of hotel may be imposed by their company; second, even if they are allowed to choose, finding one near an airport or city centre is no easy matter.

Mr Conti admits that his organisation has few business options but is working hard to put that right.

So just how does one choose * and what is * an environmentally friendly hotel?

Eco Hotels of the World has a rating system that highlights eco-friendly policies. These include: as much recycling as possible * everything from batteries to food waste * perhaps even using a sewerage system to irrigate a garden; using low-energy lights; taking part in local conservation programmes; using organic and Fair Trade ingredients; using food from local producers and planting only local plants; minimising water usage and systematic replacement of appliances and fixtures for more environmentally friendly items (www.ecohotelsoftheworld.com).

Business travellers can also help the environment by taking their green routines on the road. In a survey commissioned by Element Hotels, an extended-stay brand from Starwood, one of the world's largest hotel and leisure companies, nearly 60 per cent of frequent travellers admit dropping their green routines while travelling.

While 70 per cent agree that they try to conserve water "as much as possible" at home, only 18 per cent do the same in a hotel. And 63 per cent admit to being more likely to leave a light on when they leave a hotel room than at home.

Starwood has been working with the Carbon Trust to determine ways to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. Like most businesses it has come to the conclusion that saving energy also means saving money.

Fairmont Hotels and Resorts has used energy-saving measures for a long time. All front desk computers at its North American properties run on wind power bought from a sustainable energy co-operative.

But even though energy and the environment are hot topics only seven hotels are registered under the US Green Building Council's rating system for commercial buildings.

So while the trend towards greener hotels and environmental initiatives is certainly gaining ground in the accommodation industry there is a long way to go in terms of building a new generation of green hotels.

Sleep easy

The Orchid, Mumbai

A rarity in Asia, this eco-friendly five-star hotel is surrounded by lush gardens next to the domestic airport. It has great views over the city from the rooftop pool and restaurant. Although it looks like just another airport hotel, the Orchid was built using sustainable materials and designed to require minimal heating, lighting and electricity. But you still get every conceivable five-star luxury for your money. There's a 24-hour coffee shop, a bar and nightclub and an wide selection of restaurants.

Nice eco touch: Reed slippers and cotton robes.

Contact: 70-C, Nehru Road, Vile Parle (E), Mumbai 400099. Tel: 022-26164040. www.orchidhotel.com Fairmont Hotel, Vancouver With the 2010 Winter Olympics on the horizon this will be a very popular choice for leisure and business users who want to be seen to be green. The hotel's Green Partnership Program has improved waste reduction, recycling, hazardous waste management, energy efficiency, water conservation, and green purchasing.

Nice eco touch: Its recycled organic waste is turned into potting soil to nourish the hotel's flowerbeds.

Contact: 900 West Georgia St, Vancouver - +1 604 684 3131. www.fairmont.com The Howard, Edinburgh A gold-graded member of the Green Tourism Business Scheme, this five-star hotel shows that penny pinching is not the only way to be green. The hotel recycles as much as it can. It works at reducing energy consumption and believes hotelkeepers should take the initiative and learn to specify their eco needs rather than rely on suppliers.

Nice eco touch: It encourages biodiversity in its garden, through bird boxes, feeders and insect logs.

Contact: 34 Great King Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6QH. Tel: +44 (0) 131 557 3500. www.thehoward.com

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

Greek and Green: the Levendis Estate on a Ionian Island
By Serge the Concierge
Published: Apr 22, 2008

Practice what you preach as they say, one basic way we can change the impact of our travel is picking hotels that act responsibly and might also improve their bottom line as a consequence.

A good place to start is Eco Hotels of the World which provides a guide of the best places they could find.

Their most recent pick is the Levendis Estate which they describe as "a 7-acre organic farm offering eco-chic, family friendly and romantic holidays on the shores of the Greek Ionian island of Ithaca. Perched on a hillside of the northern-most tip of the island, Levendis is a working Estate which has produced organic olive oil for four generations".

The property also produces in organic fashion, almonds, walnuts, figs, pears, apricots, plums and citrus. and has its own vegetable and herb gardens.

The estate added 4 houses to accommodate families.

In Eco-hotels thin on the ground, Jill James (Responsible Traveler, FT, April 21) offers her 3 top picks.

They are The Orchid (Mumbai, India) which details what they call their Envirocontent, Fairmont Hotel (Vancouver, Canada) and The Howard (Edinburgh, Scotland).

Want to add your own undiscovered gems, share with us.

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

Eco hotels around the world
By Modern Day Traveler
Published: Apr 22, 2008

The Hotel world is changing and for the first time it finds itself in the impossible position of having to provide comfort and luxury whilst also satisfying the discerning eco-aware customer. You see it had to happen eventually, recent studies suggest that the classic hotel is regarded as a kingdom of wastage where the average visitor abandons its well-crafted ecological habits in favour of a careless "I paid for this" attitude. The average guest would check-in to a hotel and immediately forget to turn lights off when not needed or would leave the tap running or even the TV on when not in the room, all things that at home seemed to be more obvious.

As time has gone by, it seems that the onus has fallen onto the hotels themselves to teach and be more in tune with the environment so that in time the guest attitude would change.

Whilst this is true of the inner city industry, in the same timeframe the world has seen an explosion of eco lodges and hotels carefully placed in the most ecologically interesting places on the planet from mountains to jungles and in these a new breed of traveller is enjoying the beauty of nature in the knowledge that their stay is not impacting on it.

Of course with this new-found interest a whole selection of lists and online guides have appeared to try and show the interested public where these new hotspots of eco-entrepreneurship are located. My favourite at the moment is www.ecohotelsoftheworld.com

To go back to the top click here

Stay at Green Hotels When You're On the Go
By Collin Dunn
Published: May 9, 2008

When you're on the go, traveling for work or play, it's not always easy to find accommodations that match up with the green ideals you live by at home. Happily, there are an increasing number of resources available to help you stay green wherever you travel.

First off, what makes a green hotel? As with green homes, there are myriad ways to go green, from energy efficiency upgrades, like using compact fluorescent light bulbs, to health-related green improvements, like switching to green cleaners or using low- or no-VOC paints and furnishings, to systems improvements, like LEED or Energy Star-ratings for the entire building.

A good green hotel will mix many of these; as your home away from home, hotels can engage in many of the same actions you do at home in each room. In the bathroom, for example, they can use amenities like low-flow showerheads, give you the option to not wash your towel every day, offer eco-friendly shampoos and soaps, and clean it with green cleaners every day. They can serve local and organic food in the restaurant downstairs, use furniture that doesn't contain PBDEs and other icky chemicals, and put motion sensors on the lights so the lights don't get left on all day when they don't have to be.

How to find green hotels With those basic ideas in mind, how do you find places that engage in such practices? Thankfully, there are a growing number of resources that offer lists of greener hotels, along with their own definitions for what makes a place "green," and even ratings for those places to help you pick based on what green considerations are more important to you.

Green Hotels Association is a member-based organization that includes hotels in the majority of U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and a few in Mexico, the Carribean, South America, Europe and more. They don't list each hotels' individual green offerings, though membership requires that green actions be in place.

Green Hotel Reviews does exactly what it's name suggests: reviews green hotels, both for a given hotel's general accommodations and for their green efforts, whether that includes LEED or Energy Star-certification or membership in the Green Hotel Association. They don't have every green hotel under the sun, but the site provides useful contextual information about what's out there, and how to look for it.

Environmentally Friendly Hotels incorporates some fun online community features into their site, allowing users to submit and review various green hotels based on their experiences and relative green accomplishments. The site also uses a hotel rating system that scores individual hotels on their green efforts. Using "green trees" rather than "gold stars" or some other scoring mark, hotels can be rated on everything from using of alternative energy to donating to charity to greywater recycling and more. You can also use the site to search for a green hotel wherever you're heading.

New to the game is Eco Hotels of the World, which offers an amalgamation of many of the services mentioned above. They have a green rating system (using stars, rather than trees), offer an Editor's Pick to showcase a great example of a green hotel, and offer the opportunity to search by "green stars" and location. Though they've only been online for about six months, they already have listings on six of the seven continents (sorry, Antarctica).

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

Find Your Own Eco Hotel
By Janelle Nanos
Published: May 22, 2008

We're always on the hunt for new and interesting environmentally friendly hotels (you can see some of our recent finds here and here). So we were excited to learn about a new website that's begun listing some of the best. The aptly-named Eco Hotels of the World has a write-ups of more than 75 "green" properties; their mission is to help people "enjoy [your] next holiday knowing that you are one of the good guys!" We think of ourselves as good guys, so we were happy to have a look.

Click through the site's handy map to navigate the options: For example, you can crash at the Bushy Point Fernbirds Homestay in New Zealand, a two-bedroom B&B located on a privately-owned nature reserve that uses recycled rainwater and is completely carbon neutral. Or perhaps you'd rather venture to the village of Ulpotha, a Sri Lankan pilgrimage site and yoga retreat that has us longing to do some downward dogs. They don't use electricity (only lamp oil and a bit of kerosene), offer yoga classes twice daily, and as the listing says: "The villagers that run Ulpotha do not need to know the meaning of the word eco as their lives are inherently ecologically sound."

The site has a five-star rating system, and asks that hotels fill out a questionnaire about their sustainable practices. Not surprisingly, a majority of the hotels give themselves a five-star rating on nearly every count, but it's good to know that the hotels are heavily vetted by the site's editors (and many of them are also on our Stay List). Eco Hotels' director, Alex Conti, tells us that they're still growing in terms of listings, but we think it could become a great resource for someone looking to be "one of the good guys."

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

Ecoturismo, un sito utile
By Valentina M.
Published: May 27, 2008

Molte sono le dritte e le fonti per organizzare un viaggio all’insegna del turismo responsabile. Se è vero che l’ecoturismo è sempre più di moda, è interessante l’idea di un sito come questo che raccoglie le esperienze alberghiere di turismo eco-compatibile presenti nel mondo.

Eco hotels, tutto in inglese, è sostanzialmente una raccolta di alberghi dove i redattori assegnano punteggi di compatibilità ambientale in base alle soluzioni adottate per l’energia, i rifiuti, l’acqua etc. fondando l’analisi su un questionario che la struttura deve compilare. In Italia per il momento sono presenti due alberghi, una in prossimità dell’Etna, per una vacanza tutta siciliana e l’altro ad Urbino, che totalizza il massimo di punteggio con 5 ecostelle!

Ecoturismo sotto la lente, un sito inglese aiuta a scegliere
By Zuppello Maria
Published: June 6, 2008

Nel 2006 l’ecoturismo in Italia ha contato un fatturato di oltre 9 miliardi di euro. Un business in crescita che significa da un lato viaggiare in modo responsabile rispettando la natura ma dall’altro anche una crescita di infrastrutture in grado di garantire vacanze all’insegna dell’ambiente. Come muoversi però e soprattutto come fare a non perdersi e possibilmente a scegliere il meglio?

Un sito britannico è diventato un punto di riferimento per i viaggiatori di tutto il mondo. Ecohotels, infatti, è una vera e propria e-zine che seleziona le proposte più interessanti in base alle soluzioni adottate per l’energia, i rifiuti, l’acqua. I criteri di recensione degli alberghi sono rigorosissimi e si accompagnano ad un dettagliato questionario che viene inviato alle strutture di ricezione che ha lo scopo appunto di verificare se l’ambiente nelle sue declinazione sia o meno la priorità per quell’hotel.

L’Italia per il momento è stata recensita solo con due alberghi. Il primo si trova in Sicilia, non lontano dall’Etna. Non solo, avvisano i redattori del sito, si dorme in un palazzo dell’800 ospitati dai Baroni Coffari di Gilferraro ma la struttura si è meritata un bel 3 stelle per quanto riguarda l’energia solare e 5 per l’acqua, priva di pesticidi e fertilizzanti La seconda struttura italiana schedata è la Locanda della Valle Nuova nei pressi di Urbino le cui stanze vengono decantate per essere isolate termicamente e acusticamente. Ma la locanda viene anche elogiata per le sue stalle che permettono ai turisti appassionati di equitazione di custodire lì il proprio cavallo.

All’estero invece il palmarès per rispetto dell’ambiente ma anche, aggiungiamo noi, per originalità va all’Iglu-Dorf isponibile in 4 località della Svizzera e in una della Germania. Si tratta di veri e propri igloo dove spesso, quando scende la notte, si resta a lume di candela. Altra curiosità. Le strutture mettono a disposizione corsi di scultura con il ghiaccio. Chi vuole può imparare, così, anche a fabbricarsi il proprio igloo.

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

Ecoturismo, dalla Gran Bretagna una guida on line per gli Eco Hotels
By Silvia.
Published: June 8, 2008

Ecoturisti fai da te? Si può. Ma se si è in cerca di un consiglio si può andare a visitare il sito Eco Hotels. Si tratta di un portale britannico che fornisce una recensione ambientale (gratuita) delle strutture ricettive nel mondo.

Ogni hotel è classificato in stelle (da una a cinque), proprio come accade per i nostri. Questo rating però non indica solo la qualità ricettiva della struttura ma anche la sua sostenibilità ambientale. Il sito prende in considerazione cinque i parametri quali il consumo di energia, di acqua, il sistema di smaltimento dei rifiuti, la tutela ambientale e le azioni messe in atto per diffondere una cultura ecosostenibile.

Ad esempio si prende in considerazione se la struttura aderisce a un qualche programma istituzionale e non di tutela dell’ambiente circostante, se ci sono dei corsi di sensibilizzazione ambientale per lo staff, ecc. I redattori del sito garantiscono che ogni struttura è stata personalmente visitata!

Cliccando su ogni hotel si apre una scheda dove la struttura è descritta e si spiega il perché siano state conferite le stelle verdi. I lettori possono partecipare alle recensioni inserendo i loro commenti e inviando segnalazioni riguardo ad altri alberghi da loro visitati.

Sulla home page si può trovare una cartina del mondo con una serie di stelle verdi. Cliccando sull’area dell’Italia escono fuori due strutture: l’Etna Lodge e la Locanda della Valle Nuova.

L’Etna Lodge è in Sicilia e vanta tre stelle verdi, dovute soprattutto alla partecipazione dell’hotel a programmi e corsi e alla gestione dell’acqua. La Locanda della Valle Nuova si trova invece nelle Marche. Non si tratta solo di una struttura ricettiva ma anche di un’azienda che coltiva con il metodo biologico ben 75 ettari di terra ed alleva vari tipi di animali. Eco Hotel ha conferito a questa locanda ben cinque stelle verdi. L’hotel ha infatti raggiunto il massimo punteggio in quasi tutti i settori come quello dell’energia, del consumo di acqua e dei rifiuti.

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here

eco hotels of the world
By rd.
Published: July 9, 2008

Though the energy crunch is getting everyone down, I presume there are still some intrepid travelers looking for eco-friendly, green vacation destinations. Eco Hotels of the World has developed a five-star rating system for hotels and destinations that rates properties on their eco-friendly quotient. The free on-line guide is a new, easy to use guide to eco-friendly lodging worldwide. If you run an eco-friendly hotel, b&b, or property get yourself in their database.

For the Original article click Here
To go back to the top click here