Are you in control of one of the biggest costs to your hotel?

When was the last time you took time out of your day to review the energy your hotel or restaurant uses?

Following staff wages, your energy consumption could possibly be one of the largest costs to your business. Yet every week I meet hospitality managers that don’t have control over their energy consumption.

I always found it funny, I spent 4 and a half years in hotel management training. They told me how to budget, how to forecast, how to control staff wages…. However, nobody ever told me that when I finally became a hotel manager, I would also be in charge of a building. 

A building that inevitably comes with high costs due to running energy, water and waste.

In my early hotel management years I was often assigned the early duty manager shift, where I would walk into work at 6.30am and meet the only person up earlier than me! My best buddy -  the breakfast chef!

For years I witnessed breakfast chefs arrive on duty and turn all the lights on, all the ovens on, extractor fans, grills, fryers - equipment the length and breadth of the kitchen was turned on. It was like working on an auto pilot. You come in and you switch everything on just to be ready for the long day ahead.

Decide when you spend money, don’t leave it up to your team

The costs of having a main oven on when is not needed are much higher than you might think. Say your main oven uses 31.8 kWh, your electricity unit price is €0.14. Switching off your oven for just one extra hour a day can save you €1,624 in just one year! And that is just one machine, imagine the savings you could achieve if you used all your equipment for one hour less every day?

We often forget that when it comes to spending money in our business - it is our team that is making daily decisions. Allowing them to decide when to use equipment, when to turn on or off the heating, when something should be put in the bin, or when to leave that cold water tap running to cool down the pasta is essentially costing YOUR BUSINESS money and consuming unnecessary amounts of energy and increasing your carbon footprint.

Would you allow your team to decide how much they should get paid? Then why do you allow them to decide how much energy your business needs to use?

A question of Carbon footprint or Cost control?

Energy use is the largest source of carbon footprint generation from our businesses. So it is not just a question of “cost”, it is also a question of “ethics”.

The whole world is watching today’s children, activists and scientists telling us we are facing the biggest crisis humanity has ever seen. Whether you believe in climate change or not: Is it not our duty as managers to ensure our business only produces the carbon footprint that it actually requires to operate?

Using more energy than you need to is not only a waste of carbon, it is also a waste to your bank account. So whatever reason you choose to motivate yourself, they are both worth a small shift in mindset.

How to take control of your business energy consumption

Fixing this problem is actually much easier than you think. I am not an advocate of large investment projects to start with when it comes to running a more sustainable business. Yes it would be wonderful if we could all afford to retrofit our buildings, to install solar panels and windmills - but not everyone can afford that right now. 

So start small, generate some savings, and use those savings later for larger capital projects.

Small changes can make a huge difference. Here are some top line tips to get started:

• Spend time analysing your energy bills, electricity, gas, oil…Do you understand with clarity what you have been charged for?
• Start monitoring your consumption, on a daily, weekly or at least monthly basis.
• Write down procedures for turning equipment & lights on and off, train your team and ensure they comply.
• Walk around your business and ask yourself: Do I need that machine on right now to make money?
• Check your boiler settings and efficiency. What temperature are you heating up water at?

The reality is, if I was to ask those questions to 100 hospitality managers - only about 5 of them would have already done this. I know I would not have been able to say yes to the above points myself during my years as a hotel manager. It is kind of out of sight, out of mind.

Potential savings

When I first got involved in the Green Hospitality world, we started introducing really small actions to our daily tasks. We studied our energy bills, we got better deals, we took control of when and where we used energy, we created an energy team, we changed our light bulbs over time. None of those actions cost us a fortune, but in the 24 months since the start of our hotel’s green program, we had managed to reduce our energy consumption by 30%.

30%!!

What would does savings mean to your business?

Can you afford to ignore your Energy consumption?

Running a Green Hotel is not just the “nice” thing to do, it is the “smart” thing to do.

I hope this helps you today, Raquel