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Earth Hour 2014: Hospitality leader sets an example

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This past Saturday the world celebrated the 7th annual Earth Hour – a small period of time in which businesses, individuals and organizations turn off their lights to shed figurative light on environmental sustainability. This is no small initiative. More than 5 million people in 150 different countries have made Earth Hour the biggest mass participation event in the world.

Earth_Nov 9Among the millions, Wyndham Worldwide pledged its participation at its corporate headquarters in Parsippany, NJ, and various other brand-affiliated locations across the globe. Between the hours 8:30 and 9:30pm, Wyndham switched off more than its lights. Employees were urged to shut down all electronics, and candlelit dinners were offered to guests willing to participate.

Wyndham Worldwide is known as the world’s largest hotel company and because of this its many green accolades are especially influential and inspiring. The company’s ‘Wyndham Green’ program has been improving the quality of guest stays, work lives of employees and the environment since 2006.

It’s amazing what awareness can do. Earth Hour has become a globally recognized event which not only serves to save valuable resources through energy preservation; it has sparked environmental consciousness in citizens everywhere and inspired countless new initiatives.

Earth Hour, powered by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), has since created Earth Hour Blue – a website serving as a crowdfunding hub for green innovation and action. If you missed the chance to turn off your lights with Earth Hour participants, head on over to the website and help a project get funded. Every dollar counts.

Eco-friendly lodging, part 2: Wyndham Worldwide reduces its carbon footprint by five percent

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In last week’s blog post, The Refinishing Touch team discussed the importance of environmental preservation, especially in the revitalized, booming hospitality industry. A great example of green leadership and implementation of sustainable practices were found at Marriott’s new TownePlace Suites located in Denver Airport at Gateway Park – and now another eco-friendly competitor has made its own mark.

Congratulations are in order to the Wyndham Worldwide, as the hospitality company recently revealed its 2011 Sustainability Report and it saw a five percent reduction in its carbon footprint since last year.

A Wyndham brand hotelThis is a big step in the right direction toward Wyndham’s corporate goal – achieving a 12 percent total carbon footprint reduction by the year 2016. A large part of the program’s success is due to the 2010 implementation of the Wyndham Green Toolbox, a cutting-edge software program that allows all of Wyndham’s worldwide businesses to centralize and report sustainability tracking and measuring.

The Refinishing Touch’s award-winning furniture asset management services – which include refinishing using low VOC lacquers and reupholstering with top of the line Touch Textiles fabric – have also been implemented at various Wyndham Worldwide locations. Our on-site production team has completed renovation projects at the Wyndham in Baltimore, MD; Harrisburg, PA; and Morrisville, NC.

Through the use of its Green Toolbox, our furniture asset management services and other eco-friendly strategies, the Wyndham brand is ranked as one of the top 100 greenest companies in the US by Newsweek – coming in at number one among hospitality and restaurant companies.

For the latest green happenings in the hospitality, government and higher education industries, be sure to sign up for our quarterly newsletter, InTouch. You can do so by visiting our homepage, and entering your contact information in the right-hand panel.

Along with the latest in sustainability news, we’ll also uncover the most popular answers to our weekly blog polls and fill you in on some of the team’s most recent renovation projects. You don’t want to miss the next issue of InTouch when it arrives at the beginning of November!

A closer look into the behavior of green lodgers

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Here at The Refinishing Touch, we are constantly monitoring the latest sustainability efforts and updates from the hospitality industry, especially with the recent post-recession comeback the sector has made.

As providers of on-site, sustainable furniture asset management services, we have refinished, reupholstered, and refurbished furniture in some of the most popular hotel chains. Our hospitality clients include the Hilton brand family, InterContinental Hotels Group, Wyndham Worldwide, Starwood, and many others.

Whether through our services or other innovative sustainable initiatives, hoteliers are finding new ways to implement environmentally-friendly policies and satisfy green consumers’ requests. A recent study conducted by the University of New Hampshire analyzed the common behaviors of 563 US hotel guests, and here’s what the results found:

– Sustainable lodgers will look for hard evidence of a hotel’s commitment to the environment, like offering a dinner menu with food supplied by local farmers

– Green consumers tend to be more concerned for others and have a higher desire to work for the good of society

– Environmentally-conscious guests place high value on courteous social behavior

To read more results from the UNH survey, click here. For information on our furniture asset management services and its minimal carbon impact on the environment, please visit our website: https://www.therefinishingtouch.com/

End of season statistics show progress for hotel industry

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As tourists pack up their bags and the summer comes to a close, hoteliers around the nation are taking the time to evaluate operating performances during the end of season lull – and the results are spreading some much needed optimism around the industry.

According to a recent article in 4Hoteliers, hotel markets in key Floridian locales – including Orlando, Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Daytona Beach – have fully recovered and gained momentum since the nightmarish recession.

In the Orlando area alone, the number of occupied room nights has surpassed pre-recession statistics, with over 4.6 million room nights sold this past year (May 2012 YTD). The figure indicates a 3 percent increase from the nights recorded five years earlier, in May 2007 YTD.

As providers of sustainable, on-site furniture asset management services to numerous hospitality clients across the nation, The Refinishing Touch commends the industry for demonstrating persistence, tenacity, and, as a result, recovering from the economic slump that severed so many other business sectors.

Our furniture refinishing, reupholstering, and remanufacturing services have been implemented in some of the most well-known hotel chains, such as the Hilton, InterContinental Hotels Group, and Wyndham Worldwide. And even as the market continues to flourish, our sustainable services remain as the leading sustainable, cost-effective furniture asset management, improving the overall appearance of an establishment while remaining cognizant of a company’s bottom line.

For more information on The Refinishing Touch’s furniture asset management services across the hospitality, government and higher education industries, please visit https://www.therefinishingtouch.com/projects.html. For the latest updates on our sustainable renovation projects, be sure to follow us on Twitter: @RefinishTouch.

Wyndham Worldwide supports Earth Hour

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As we mentioned at the beginning of the month, this year marks the 42nd annual Earth Day celebration, and while millions around the world will celebrate in different ways—from committing to recycling to agreeing to compost for a year—millions have already participated in Earth Hour as a prelude. One hour where everyone agreed to stop using electricity and “switch off”.

Observed on March 31, hundreds of millions of people and organizations turned off their lights, recognizing the thought and care that should go into using our precious resources. As a sustainable refinishing company that works with universities, hotels and government agencies across the country, we were interested in learning which organizations participated in Earth Hour.

One of the most notable was Wyndham Worldwide—parent company to hotels such as Planet Hollywood and Ramada—which announced its participation in Earth Hour by saying it would participate and “demonstrate their commitment to environmentally sustainable action.”

As a hotel organization known for its leadership in sustainable practices and with our first-hand experience with Wyndham Worldwide’s commitment to sustainability, it comes as little surprise that its energy goals are so substantial. The hospitality company is on track to reduce overall emissions by 12 percent be 2016 and 20 percent by 2020.

We are very happy to see such a large hotel organization be so open and forthcoming about its goal for sustainability. This type of transparency will only encourage other hotel organizations, large and small, to commit to sustainable practices, so we can all work together to help preserve our environment.

For more information on Wyndham Worldwide’s sustainable practices and initiatives, visit Wyndham Green.

For a touching overview of this year’s Earth Hour, watch the video below: