Also, from his work with benchmarking studies for the Environmental Protection Agency’s voluntary energy management program, Energy Star, Anderson found that the purchase of equipment and services didn’t necessarily contribute to high performance. “It’s not very sexy, but, for us, we’ve been able to get 10 to 20 percent savings without having to buy a bunch of stuff,” Anderson continues. One of his first moves was to hire Hand as senior advisor, operations and sustainability to focus solely on Blackstone’s lodging assets. She had worked with Anderson in support of Energy Star, and he knew she shared his same thinking when it came to low-cost sustainability. Their first goal was to extend their approach to all of Blackstone’s lodging assets, many of which already had excellent programs in place. Getting those companies to the next level required them to undertake a combination of broad-based data gathering and analysis, communications and information sharing, and targeted standard operating procedures.
“The overarching commonality is that everyone is under a lot of pressure to cut costs and increase revenues—improve their businesses but also make guests as comfortable as they possibly can and build guest loyalty,” Hand says. “We don’t want to just add more to someone’s workload when they are already very busy. Adding additional tasks should be beneficial to employees while being equated to potential savings.”
It Starts With Data
In explaining Blackstone’s emphasis on a data-driven approach, Anderson begins with one broad statistic. “The hospitality industry is the fourth-most energy-intensive commercial industry in the country.” By having a data-driven approach, he says, the company has been able to measure and understand the energy loads, profiles, and challenges.
Hand cites an initiative recently undertaken by Motel 6 targeting incentives provided by utility companies. For investments made in 2013, the company collected more than $100,000 in incentive money retroactively, which Hand calculates as the equivalent of a $.09 increase in average daily rate (ADR). In 2014, Motel 6 expects to capture $250,000 through utility incentives. “This money becomes essential to motivating the next level of investment in efficiency.”
Motel 6’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed throughout the Blackstone hierarchy. “We tie a lot of our energy performance improvement to equivalent improvement in ADR to demonstrate the impact in metrics that can be understood by management,” Hand says. Putting sustainability measures into metrics that can be understood in one sentence helps facilitate high-level buy-in, according to Hand.
The metrics of low-cost approaches matter even more to Motel 6 than its full-service Blackstone siblings. With more than 1,100 Motel 6 properties, of which some 500 are corporate-owned, Motel 6 executives say their efforts are determined in large part by the brand’s pricing policy. “We remain committed to offering the lowest price of any national chain,” says Renee Swoger, Motel 6’s director of brand operations projects. “As an economy lodging brand, we have limited capex outside of the scope of our national renovation program. We have to get creative and make our pennies go a long way, which we are actually very good at. Our strategy with Blackstone has really been to focus on quick and smart investments that yield a good return.”
Case in point, since 2010, Motel 6 has monitored the energy and water usage of all its properties on a continuous basis using a centralized data-gathering platform. “Energy Dashboard has been something Blackstone has been very impressed with,” Swoger says. “It is a sophisticated, interactive tool that uses statistics to assess consumption goals. It takes into account actual data from weather stations, occupancy data, and consumption data and basically tells all of our hotels that they should be consuming X kilowatt hours but they are actually at Y kilowatt hours.
“Within that tool, we’ve embedded our standard operating procedures for energy and water management,” she continues. “It’s very simplistic—utility consumption is either in the red or in the green. It’s a 3 a.m. meter check that can alert property operators to potential water leaks and then steer them to the SOP playbook, which might advise checking for worn-out toilet flappers.”
Swoger looks back at Motel 6’s participation in the quarterly Blackstone Sustainability Summits with no small amount of pride. “When we came to the table, we had ideas and practices that we thought were creative and innovative,” she says. “It’s reassuring to run some of the more pioneering ideas by our sister companies.”
