In case you haven't noticed, hotels are going green, doing their part to be ecologically friendly. You might call it the Al Gore effect, although the movement began before "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award this year.
The green efforts go further than asking guests to use towels and bed linens more than once (as they do at home), to conserve water and avoid flushing more detergent-laden water into sewers. It's also more than replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs in guest rooms.
Other green initiatives are more subtle -- things a guest might never notice: recycling, low-flow faucets and shower heads, water-saving toilets and the use of products that don't harm the environment or contribute to global warming.
Whether guests truly care about these hotel efforts is another matter. When you call a hotel to make a reservation, what are you most concerned about -- the room rate and hotel's location, or its conservation efforts? The only green at issue is dollar cost.
Some 59 percent of frequent travelers admit to letting their "green routines" slip when on the road, according to a just-released survey commissioned by the new Element extended-stay brand of Westin Hotels, part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Conducted by StudyLogic, a New York research firm, via telephone interviews with 1,041 respondents who had a minimum of three hotel stays over the last 12 months, the survey of frequent travelers found: