Smoke Gets in Their ROIs
April 2006
Did you Know
Ray Burger was working as a hotel manager in 1999 when he landed his dream client, a group of soccer players who wanted to book the entire hotel. There was only one catch: the group insisted that every room in the hotel be a non-smoking room.
“At the time, about 80 percent of our rooms were non-smoking,” Burger recalls. “We were able to convert the top floor into non-smoking, and then have it go back to smoking rooms after they left.”
It was the kind of experience that convinced Burger there would soon be a market for entirely smoke-free hotels. This January, in the same month the Westin hotel chain announced that smoking would be banned in all of its rooms, Burger launched freshstay.com. The site provides information about the Westin and dozens of smaller hotels where guests are guaranteed a room that doesn’t smell like an ashtray.
The non-smoking trend is nothing new. At least 14 states have banned smoking in public places, such as bars and restaurants. But while those laws have drawn sharp protests from advocates of smokers’ rights (not to mention bar and restaurant owners), few cigarette-loving hotel guests seem to mind being placed in a non-smoking room. That’s good news for meeting planners hoping to keep as many delegates happy as possible while booking accommodations.
“It’s something I have to be concerned with if I’m doing a good job looking into the meeting planning,” says Joan Eisenstodt, chief strategist for Eisenstodt Associates LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that specializes in conference consulting, facilitating and training. “If I’m booking a group that has 25-percent smokers, and they want to find a hotel in California, then there may be a problem.”
Recently, however, Eisenstodt finds that even her smoking delegates are often choosing non-smoking rooms.“They don’t want to stay in a smoking room, because it smells so foul,” she says. “And because a lot of the groups I work with are medical or educational, there’s a great stigma associated with smoking, so they’re often very sheepish about going out to smoke anyway. Of the 300 people who attended a meeting I planned in April, only five requested smoking rooms.”
American smokers may be an endangered species. But how can planners accommodate delegates from countries where lighting up in public is still an accepted way of life?
At the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center, General Manager Bruce Gorton says it’s been less of a problem than one might think. “We’re part of UCSF, which is the leader in smoking research, so our entire campus is smoke-free,” Gorton says. “We were afraid we’d have some challenges when it came to some of our global conferences. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, two of the conferences we were worried about have told us they’re coming back.”
Unlike bars or restaurants in places where smoking is prohibited by law, hotels that choose to go smoke-free face no legal standard to define what “smoke-free” means. After all, many travelers have stayed in “non-smoking” hotel rooms that still smelled like someone’s cigarette break. But entirely smoke-free hotels may be a different story, Burger says. As someone who’s had to convert smoking rooms to non-smoking rooms, he knows what a difficult and expensive process it can be. (Westin reports that its smoking ban and room refurbishment cost about $2.9 million.)
Burger believes hotels will want to protect that investment by keeping guests from lighting up in their rooms. “It’s so expensive, and the demand is too high for non-smoking rooms,” Burger says. “And I have to wonder if it won’t eventually be calculated into a hotel’s insurance rates, because of the reduced risk of fire when a hotel goes non-smoking.”
Planners may have an even stronger motivation for choosing smoke-free rooms: their health. Eisenstodt says she’s only ever heard one smoker complain about being placed in a non-smoking room—her own mother. And she’s refused to listen to her mother’s advice.
“If someone doesn’t smoke, he’s not doing himself any harm,” she says. “He might be antsy; he might not be very nice. But if he smokes, he’s harming me. My mother can say all she wants about her rights as a smoker, but I’m not buying it.”
