Have you seen this sign? Its in nearly every hotel bathroom in the country (I haven’t been in a Ritz or Four 
Seasons lately, but something tells me they refrain). On the surface, you might be tempted to applaud the hotel industry’s new found sensitivity to waste, their desire to (as they say at the top of the sign) “Save Our Planet”.
But I’m not buying it. I don’t think they give a damn about the environment. I think they care about one thing: Reducing Operating Costs. What really bothers me about this campaign is that they think I’m stupid enough to believe it, and they’re willing to exploit a legitimate cause to guilt me into action.
Why hide their true motivation? Why not write something like this: “Washing towels costs this hotel a lot of money. Like everything else, we pass these costs on to you by increasing nightly rates. Help us keep our rates reasonable by using your towel more than once, like you do at home. Oh, and by the way, its good for the environment too.”
What’s the moral to this story? Customers know when you’re being genuine. They know when you pretend to care but you really don’t. So just be honest with them. They’ll respect you a lot more for it.
Tags: advice
Intelligent Selling 
May 25, 2010 at 9:52 am |
This is right on the money
May 26, 2010 at 11:53 am |
So let’s say you don’t use one of the towels and you leave it neatly folded on the rack to comply with their ‘Save the Earth’ request. Do they replace this towel when you check out? I hope they do because how can they guarantee it wasn’t used in some way?
So if they are going to replace that ‘fresh’ towel anyway, why not use a new towel each time? This of course doesn’t apply if you stay in the same hotel for a week but how many of us business travelers really do that anyway?
They lose more money on the folks that steal the towels than repeated washings. I bet we all know at least one person that does that.
So they could have a sign that said, “Please don’t steal the towels because they are made in Mexico and every towel we have to buy supports the illegal drug trade in this country and cost Americans textile jobs and oh by the way, then we have to wash it and ruin our planet.”