Sinage for your 'Green' facility

Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum

Help Support Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

River Wren

Well-known member
Joined
Oct 2, 2009
Messages
62
Reaction score
0
For those of you who have gone green, how do you express this to your guests? For example, do you have signs in your bathrooms that say something specific? Like how often you replace towels? I guess what I am asking is how you get this message across? Thanks.
 
We were given a flag by the state that we can display outside and one inside as well (little desktop flag). We have it in our room notebooks with an explanation of what it means. We do the little cards about hanging up your towels. If guests inquire about recycling we explain how we handle that. We have a state-issued logo we can put on our website.
I don't push this. MANY people who are seriously pursuing the eco lifestyle think we're not even close, so we don't want them to come here and then blast us for our puny efforts. (ie- one family who brought their own food and their own juicers because they would not eat 'corporate' foods.)
We don't use 100% organic cotton products or 100% green soaps & shampoos, so the green thing is not something I really tout. We do what we do, but we're nowhere near the level of places generating their own power and supplying their own foods.
 
I don't go overboard with this, but I do have signs in each room that read:
We invite you to join with us to conserve water and energy by using your towels more than once and turning off your lights when not in use.
The rest is up to the guest.
 
I am like Morticia and FD, we are not overly green here but do what we can and are improving as we can. We have 1 sign in our bathrooms that say:
Protecting Mother Earth then proceed with what we are doing and how they can assist us. As Mort said there are some really Green Lovers out there that would poopoo what we are doing if we touted what we did as being a green facility.
 
I had the usual notes in the bathrooms about hanging towels to re-use. Beyond that, I didn't want to kid anybody. We did our best but when you have big 2-person jetted tubs, steam showers, and the A/C runs like nobody's business....
 
If there are dispensers in the bathroom then, yes, I'll have a small sign that tells the guests what it is, ie.
"Dispenser use in this guestroom may save up to 1,000 plastic bottles from entering our landfills each year. Shampoo is by X, Conditioner is X, Shower Gel is X"
With a nice font on parchment paper and put in a small frame, it tastefully lets guests know what they're using and why.
If septic systems are an issue (and they usually are in the countryside where I tend to work), I'll usually have a small sign on the toilet that says
"Please be gentle with your use of water and ever mindful that our small septic system works best with only the very smallest amount of tissue"
Again, being done tastefully is key (I hate finding laminated notes tacked to the wall with rules of do this/don't do that).
I also put information about all of the inn's green initiatives in the welcome books.
 
Signs, on recycled paper?
cheers.gif
 
"Please think of the environment before flushing. Before bathing. Before wiping."
...Oh and don't change clothes or you will have to wash them - just run outside in the rain.
teeth_smile.gif
 
Signs, on recycled paper?
cheers.gif
.
Joey Bloggs said:
Signs, on recycled paper?
cheers.gif
Here is where I shine! All of my notepaper is recycled from something that came in the mail. All of the guest registration forms are on the back of something else. (I make an exception for late arrival notices- don't want confusion over why they are being given a request for a donation because they're reading the wrong side, and anything the guest needs to turn in to get reimbursed for the stay is printed on 'clean' paper.) Otherwise, these new little table notes will be on recycled paper. I get lots of colorful paper from people wanting me to promote their event. If I don't catch them and they leave it on the door, I get stacks of it.
 
We mention reusing the towels when possible to conserve water and have a separate designated bin for the collection of recycling materials.
We are making a move to locally produced organic foods. At such time, I will advertise the heck out it.
If you have more than one floor in your B&B, have guests sleep upstairs to conserve gravity.
 
We have the signs (out of Eden as mentioned by me before) that say if you want your towels changing put them in the bath/shower if not put them on the rail. Am thinking of buying Hippo's (a kind of baloon you put in your toilet tank to use less water per flush) We use locally produced sossages and we are moving to use a local egg man who has his farm about 1/2 a mile away. OUr tomatoes are produced locally as well. I use recycled toilet paper and the brand we use plants 2 trees for everyone cut down. We recycle at the tip where we can but our council does not recycle at our address/area yet GRRR. However the amount of nonrecyclable rubbish is astonishing still.
 
Recycled toilet paper?..........that seems odd.
One Day said:
Recycled toilet paper?..........that seems odd
seems odd, but you know it means that the tp is made from post consumer paper (discarded office paper mostly) instead of virgin timber ... just to flush it down the toilet. i use a blend because tp from 100% recycled paper is a little rough to the touch in my opinion. but the products are getting better all the time. and we really do discard so much paper in the U.S.
 
a lot of my guests wanted to be green-er-ish by leaving their towels hung to dry out and use another day. but, in the harbor, in the humidity, the towels would sometimes just not dry out and would either still be damp and/or would not smell fresh later in the day. i appreciated their efforts, but i'd pull and replace the really wet ones, knowing they wouldn't dry. it's a delicate balance.
 
They have had recycled TP for at least 20 years. I used it when we were first married in Sydney.
 
We have a green certification and so we put the logo on our website as well as our committment to being green and how we implement it here. In the bathrooms we have a sign framed asking that if they want their towels replaced to put them in the laundry basket provided in their closet.
I think the most important thing is for them know that you are doing your green features and not just trying to do less laundry, like in most hotels. We try to make it so our guests don't feel really impacted by our green practices, yet inform them of what's happening behind the scenes.
I don't think that most guests are looking for a green place to stay, but if they equally like two separate properties, they might go for the green one just to make themselves feel good.
 
We qualified for our state green logo and have it on our website, and are listed online as such on the state website
RIki
 
about that signage ... without bashing the state ... i did a lot of work to get the place i ran on the state's green lodging list. got the stickers, etc. and put it on the website. but it turned out that a lot of the info i gave was self-reported ... an honor system.
i know for a fact that the b&b no longer uses a lot of the green products i bought, no longer recycles, etc. yet the name of the place still comes up on the state's list. the b&b doesn't claim to be 'green lodging' ... i am not faulting them ... but the state shouldn't list places that were 'certified green' two or three years ago without checking.
 
Recycled toilet paper?..........that seems odd.
One Day said:
Recycled toilet paper?..........that seems odd
seems odd, but you know it means that the tp is made from post consumer paper (discarded office paper mostly) instead of virgin timber ... just to flush it down the toilet. i use a blend because tp from 100% recycled paper is a little rough to the touch in my opinion. but the products are getting better all the time. and we really do discard so much paper in the U.S.
.
seashanty said:
One Day said:
Recycled toilet paper?..........that seems odd
seems odd, but you know it means that the tp is made from post consumer paper (discarded office paper mostly) instead of virgin timber ... just to flush it down the toilet. i use a blend because tp from 100% recycled paper is a little rough to the touch in my opinion. but the products are getting better all the time. and we really do discard so much paper in the U.S.
Some of that stuff is like sandpaper on a roll. You can find soft tp, but you have to look.
 
Back
Top