Edwardian Hotels London, one of the UK’s leading independent hotel groups, has saved more than £100,000 by cutting resource usage over the last six months after monitoring environmental performance and encouraging staff to place greater emphasis on sustainability.
Working with hospitality industry sustainability experts Considerate Hoteliers, Edwardian Hotels London has been using the Con-Serve data management system across its 12 hotels to monitor and interpret their consumption of electricity, gas and water including correlating the figures to occupancy levels and benchmarking against the industry’s performance.
By comparing the six-month results with the previous year Edwardian Hotels London has reduced its carbon footprint by 9% – the equivalent of growing 22,992 tree seedlings over 10 years.
Importantly, utility costs were cut by £107,700 by saving enough electricity to boil five million kettles, sufficient gas to heat 185 UK homes and the equivalent quantity of water to fill 64,000 bathtubs.
As well as tracking the environmental performance through automated monthly reports for individual properties and demonstrating the positive impact on profitability, one of the key aspects behind the improvement was encouraging staff, including site engineers, to think about how lasting behavioural changes could be achieved across all departments.
Through a series of workshops the team was trained to use the data management system, encouraged to identify strategies for addressing hotels’ hotspot areas and educated on how to successfully implement change across the departments.
The most effective initiatives and best practices were then shared among the group, such as reducing boiler temperatures by several degrees, lagging pipes, installing light sensors in public areas and organising regular heads of department meetings to raise awareness of sustainability and track the progress made across each area of the hotels.
Xenia zu Hohenlohe, joint managing partner for Considerate Hoteliers comments: “The results show how much can be achieved through a combination of measuring meaningful data on resources and behavioural change.
“Edwardian Hotels London was already very savvy on sustainability and yet it demonstrates how making a number of seemingly small changes such as switching off a computer at night, can together make significant improvements.”
Michael Cheung, General Manager of Radisson Blu Edwardian Vanderbilt adds: “Following feedback from the workshops and surveys, our team noticed a real difference having a dashboard of information that they can quickly interpret, including the impact of any changes we’ve made. Making sure we keep staff informed about our environmental performance using analogies that make the figures meaningful has also really drummed home the message that everybody can make a positive contribution to saving carbon and money.”
