Visit our Eco-Friendly Hotel in Spokane, Washington!

Going green is a national issue and like all businesses, it has hit the hospitality industry. Our hotel community has been discussing this and looking for ways to serve our guests well and yet protect the city we all love. It is a difficult balancing act and one which we have worked tirelessly on for the past two years.

The first step, auditing what the hotel uses on a day to day basis and how to purchase differently or use other products and still maintain guest satisfaction was a huge eye opener!!

The Pheasant Hill Inn and Suites like many limited service properties provides a full hot breakfast to our guests each morning. For years ...as in since 1996, the hotel used paper plates, cups, plastic service ware to serve breakfast. We maintained hot food for breakfast with a sterno, a jellied fuel substance that creates heat for about two hours. For many years that practice has been acceptable, it was clean, convenient and clean up was not labor intensive.

As we started counting how many paper plates and cups used on an annual basis, the number was staggering and all headed to our landfills... 60,000 plates, 45,000 cups, nearly 120,000 pieces of service ware were disposed of each year. We used 2500 cans of sterno annually, what can you do with an empty sterno can?

We then added the number of shampoo, conditioner and hand lotion bottles that we put in 104 rooms each day as guest amenities, how many bars of soap, more paper cups for in room coffee and a second set of staggering numbers hits home the need for change. We use nearly 40,000 bottles of shampoo, conditioner and hand lotion annually to provide our guests with a great experience and quality products. The number of plastic bottles used to provide those amenities just never entered our thinking ...until we decided to be an eco-friendly green hotel.

An energy audit has helped us to realize that fluorescent bulbs rather than incandescent light bulbs saves dollars in electricity and reduces the carbon imprint we leave to do business each day, how we heat our water, light our building, wash nearly a ton of linens each year all fell under the "green microscope".

During this time our staff members made regular suggestions, going green had made our team more aware of how they do their job and ways to reduce waste, energy and provide a great hotel stay with a much reduced impact on our Spokane Environment.

It sounds easy to say... just buy another product to serve your guests. In those decisions we have to ask how we will keep it clean, maintain it well, insure guest satisfaction, and meet all of the laws and regulations that a hotel must comply with. Two years into the project we are proud of what we have achieved.

Our guests now dine with china, glass and silverware. We wash dishes rather than toss used paper and Styrofoam into the trash. We immediately reduced our daily trash by 8 each 33 gallon bags. Over a year's period of time that is a reduction of 2,920... 33 gallon trash bags!!!

That change however meant we had to adjust our hotel kitchen to insure we wash and sanitize our dishware and silverware consistently. Our owners were happy to invest the dollars to update our kitchen and purchase the equipment we needed. Their input and support helped us achieve our goals much more quickly that we originally felt we could.

Green Suites Company is helping us to reduce those 40,000 bottles of shampoo and other bath amenities to less than a hundred with a stylish dispenser system for the bath and vanity area. The savings actually allowed us to upgrade the brand of amenities to the next level since we are truly paying for the product and not 40,000. Bottles.

Use of good old fashion ceramic coffee mugs in our guest rooms was a big hit with our guests. Coffee just tastes better was the overriding comment from our travelers ...and it stays hot longer. Need coffee to go? We provide travel mugs that you can take with you... bring it back and fill your travel mug over and over again. Our guests really took to that idea.

US Foods helped us to find dishwashing and laundry products low in phosphates but still able to produce sparkling clean linens and dishware. The products we use are very similar in costs to our previous laundry products; our savings is really in the amount of linen we don't have to replace.

So come stay with us at our newly eco-friendly green hotel in Spokane, Washington!

Our energy consumption has  been reduced by nearly 21% this past year simply by changing light bulbs, tuning up our boilers, watching our use in our guestrooms, and keeping our laundry equipment serviced on a monthly basis.

"Going Green" is really a project that is constantly in process. As technologies become available to us we continue to look at ...how do we do business and how can become better at this effort?

Recently the Pheasant Hill Inn and Suites was rated a 3 star rating from I Stay Green, an organization that rates hotels globally on their "green practices". That rating meant a lot to us... we all started as "green novices" so the three star stamp of approval to the hotel was significant.

As you visit our website we have the I stay Green rating on the first page of our website so that our guests know how important this is for us. We were excited to receive that distinction particularly after working diligently at this for the past two years.

Added to that, the Pheasant Hill just received the Expedia Hotel Select Award  and Trip Advisor Four Star Award for consistently outstanding service to its guests. These awards are given to only the top 1% of hotels worldwide, the award is based entirely on  customer service survey's and customer interviews.

To know that we have achieved our goal of becoming a better corporate citizen in our green efforts and still maintaining a high degree of guest satisfaction really means a lot to us. Going green has been very rewarding at many levels. Knowing that our children and grandchildren will benefit from our efforts feels pretty good too!!