Name: Jennifer Bauchner
Title: Director, Rooms and Sustainability, North America Operations
Organization: Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
Time in current position: Eight months
My primary responsibilities: “My role is a combination of responsibilities for room operations—front office and housekeeping for our 500-plus North America hotels—as well as leading sustainability initiatives at those hotels, bringing to life goals set forth in our sustainability strategy and making sure owners and managers have tools to implement them at the hotel level. I am able to have an immediate impact from a sustainability perspective. So much of what we do needs to be executed in the rooms division.”
Company’s most significant environment-related accomplishment so far: “We have fully created and rolled out a Sustainable Meetings Practices program [for North America]. It was a big focus this year. It is serving as a model to expand globally. I feel proud that we have gotten to this point.”
Organization’s most significant environment-related challenge: “Engaging the right partners and vendors to work with and going after the right initiatives that are going to have the most impact. In this space there are lots of unknowns right now.”
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—Hawaii is a long way from White Plains, New York, headquarters of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, but that is the distance Jennifer Bauchner traveled to take on the role of director, rooms and sustainability, North America Operations for Starwood. Bauchner, who is the first person at Starwood to have her current title, previously worked in several management positions at two resort properties in Hawaii.
Bauchner has been instrumental in helping Starwood not only launch a Sustainable Meetings Practices program (to be rolled out globally in 2011) but also an aggressive plan to reduce energy and water consumption at every one of Starwood’s 1,000 hotels by 2020. Specifically, Starwood is targeting a 30 percent reduction in energy use per available room and a 20 percent decrease in water consumption per available room. The initiative will apply to all of Starwood’s owned, managed, and franchised hotels around the world.
Bauchner says she is confident Starwood will reach its 2020 goals, adding that the company’s sustainability commitment is a selling point when it comes to growing the company’s brands.
“[Sustainability] is not a hard sell,” she says. “The developers we are talking with know that their customers are demanding it. It gives us another sales component. It is a good story when we are selling our brand.”
Waste is Next Target
Bauchner says Starwood is currently working on waste reduction goals to add to its energy and water reduction targets. “We will come out with a specific goal,” she says. “What we have found is that our hotels are already exploring waste reduction options.”
Those running Starwood properties are required to report monthly energy, water and waste data to Starwood as part of the company’s Environmental Initiative Assessment Survey. Starwood has been collecting such data since 2007.
“We can create annual reports using this data,” Bauchner says. “We can compare year over year. We report the data to the Carbon Disclosure Project.”
Starwood also has an Initiative Tracking Tool that is used to track green initiatives at its properties. The Tracking Tool is included at Starwood’s online Sustainability Resource Center, a reference area for all of Starwood’s sustainability-related initiatives. Even green building designs can be found there.
Starwood was the first company in the lodging industry to commit to building all of a brand’s hotels to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. That brand is Element. Bauchner says there are now seven Elements open with two more opening this year.
High Marks for Element
“The brand continues to receive high guest satisfaction scores traditionally received by our luxury brands,” she says. “Guests do love the Element experience. Now that we have gotten LEED Volume Pre-certification for Element, it will help us grow the brand.”
When asked whether or not Starwood intends to make a similar commitment to LEED for its other brands, Bauchner says the company is exploring many different options while using its current LEED certified hotels as case studies to see what makes sense.
“We are using what we have learned from Element to work with our other developers,” she says.
Bauchner explains that it was her time working in Hawaii that really got her interested in preserving the environment. “The land is of extreme importance there,” she says.
Few hotel companies have made a commitment to creating a corporate level sustainability position but that is beginning to change. Bauchner sees her role as director, rooms and sustainability, North America Operations as critical in getting more than 500 hotels to move in the same direction at the same time.
Go to Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.
Glenn Hasek can be reached at editor@greenlodgingnews.com.
