Why The Hospitality Industry Is Embracing Green Meetings
Posted on September 17th, 2012 by Ben Lack
Katarina Tesarova, Executive Director of Global Sustainability for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, discusses the importance of green meetings and why her company supports these sustainability initaitives.
Full Transcript:
| Ben Lack | Can you define how the hospitality industry defines a green meeting? |
| Katarina Tesarova | Green meeting, to us, is an event or a conference that is hosted in such a way that it reduces environmental impact or negative environmental impact. It works on all this different areas or aspects of meetings or actually even in entire stay in our hotel related to meetings, so that we do it in a more environmentally disposable way. |
| Ben Lack | What are conference organizers are doing to make their meeting green? |
| Katarina Tesarova | I can speak about what we’re doing on our side to help them make their event more green, to help them meet their clients’ commitment to sustainability. We do what is in our control. We do it in many different ways. Basically in a simple term our green meetings program has 3 tiers. The first tier is high performance facilities. That means that our buildings are green buildings. Here in Las Vegas we are LEED Certified. In Singapore we have a Green Mark Certification and in Macau we have Green Hotel Certification. So, our buildings themselves, the physical structures are green buildings. So that’s the first tier.The second tier is standard sustainable practices. And these are the green practices that we do in the course of our business whether the client request green meetings or not; we do it for everyone. Example would be recycling. We recycle all the waste and sort all the waste, regardless, whether the client wants to recycle or not. Another example would be a donation of in-room amenities to an organization called Clean The World. We do it for old convention not just for the ones that are requested. So these are standard practices that we do in the course of our business and they already make the event sustainable. There are a group of clients that have a very sophisticated understanding of sustainability.For those clients, we have a menu of different options that they can choose from. And some of these options are at no cost for them and they’re as simple as opting out from having notepads and pens on tables. We’ll be happy to do that; they just need to let us know. Some of them have a cost premium, for example, if an event wants to have organic menu, naturally, organic produce is more expensive so there’s some options that are at cost. |
| Ben Lack | For the premium options, what type of frequency do you guys see conferences and organizers taking advantage of those upsells? |
| Katarina Tesarova | Small. Small, very few actually have a strong commitment that they would invest a large amount of money to making their event sustainable. They, of course, are trying to push us as much as they can to get as many things as they can at no premium and that is our goal too, we want to offer this at no premium. |
| Ben Lack | So what’s the long term strategy of the green meetings program? |
| Katarina Tesarova | |
| Our long term goal is surely to be recognized as a definition for green meetings in all the markets where we operate. Here or Singapore or Macau or Pennsylvania, for that matter. So, that is our long term vision. And in order to get that we have a very comprehensive program for green meetings that covers just about all the aspects of meetings-planning and meetings-hosting and then in our control. The one thing that I am going to tell you, one option that people really request often and are surprised that we aren’t charging for that, is what we call an impact statement. And what we do is we basically calculate how much water, how much wastes, and how much energy the event use. And we convert it into carbon and I was doing this for free and many clients are surprised that we offer this option at no cost and it’s very popular it’s one of our most popular options. | |
| Ben Lack | What metrics do you guys have in place that will help you quantify whether the growth or the success of the green meetings program and what steps that you have to take in order to put those metrics in place? |
| Katarina Tesarova | So this kind of, goes to more of our entire environmental management system, not just the green meeting portion of it. But we do have goals. The long term goals are listed in our environmental report. It’s a reduction in carbon water and water and improvement in the recycling rate. But then these long term goals translates into short term goals and every year each property has a specific set of goals that they need to achieve. I know this is getting kind of technical, but we do have quantitative goals which are in terms of kwh reduction or a certain improvement in recycling rate. And then we also have qualitative goals and those are these things that just a little more difficult to quantify. But we have a list of projects that all the property is targeting to meet. |
| Ben Lack | Which properties or locations generally have the most green meetings? |
| Katarina Tesarova | Las Vegas because that’s what the market is. The market understands green meetings here in the US. And this is slowly changing in Asia and we’re seeing a lot more interest in Singapore but it’s just now getting there. I’d say we’ve seen the least right now in Macau. |
| Ben Lack | Why are you specifically are doing what you’re doing? Why does this industry interest you and why you’ve chosen to spend your time on this space? |
| Katarina Tesarova | It’s kind of cool and there’s not a really good answer for this but it feels really good to get up in the morning and know that what you’re working on is going to have such a huge impact on our planet. Because we all have big resource, these are not eco resource which could be super sustainable these are large, large resource that has thousands of rooms and any small thing that you do, any small initiative that you implement will have a huge impact. So it is very rewarding. And why do I do this, I don’t know, I grew up in Europe and I grew up in a country that was part of the communist block so we never had a lot of things. And we were always raised to conserve and just make a good use of what was available. So it was always part of how I grew up and I think it stayed. I don’t know if there is one good reason for that. |
| Ben Lack | Before we let you go, is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience? |
| Katarina Tesarova | Regarding the green meetings program, just a fact that, if an organization has a truly comprehensive green meetings program it can make a big difference. Oftentimes, they’re many companies that say they do green meetings but now that we’ve done the research, the study and the development of best practices, we understand how robust it is and were trying to communicate this value to our clients. |
Loading ...