BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON Online travel agency Expedia.com has added a first wave of 300-plus properties using LightStay within the Hilton Worldwide portfolio of hotel brands to Expedia’s Green Hotel Program.
With the addition of these hotels, the Expedia.com Green Hotel program now includes more than 2,000 hotels. “Expedia.com is committed to helping travelers find the broadest range of green properties in the industry,” says Tim MacDonald, senior vice president and general manager of Expedia.com. “The inclusion of Hilton Worldwide’s brands that use the LightStay system in Expedia.com’s Green Hotel Program helps fulfill that commitment.”
LightStay is Hilton’s proprietary system developed to calculate and analyze environmental impact of its properties. The system measures energy and water use and waste and carbon output at the company’s hotels around the globe. It specifically analyzes performance across 200 operational practices, such as housekeeping, paper use, food waste, chemical storage, air quality and transportation. By December 31, 2011, all of the more than 3,600 properties within Hilton Worldwide’s global portfolio of brands will use LightStay.
“We are proud to become members of Expedia.com’s Green Hotel Program. Operating our properties globally in a responsible and sustainable manner is a priority for our company and a central part of how we do business,” says Paul Brown, president of global brands and commercial services for Hilton. “By integrating sustainability performance as a brand standard, evaluated on the same level as service, Hilton Worldwide has become the first major multi-brand company in the hospitality industry to require property-level measurement of sustainability.”
To confirm the effective implementation and validity of LightStay, Hilton Worldwide commissioned KEMA-Registered Quality Inc., a management systems assessment and certification company, to perform a series of third-party audits of LightStay. The extensive audit reveals that LightStay is a best-in-class system for measuring and analyzing sustainability performance data at hotel properties.
The Expedia.com Green Hotel Program launched in April 2008 and now features more than 2,000 supply partners and more than 80 green certification programs. Travelers who are interested in the Expedia.com eco-friendly travel options can now book at any one of the thousands of green-certified properties listed on Expedia.com including the recently added properties within the Hilton portfolio of hotel brands.