Christina Jelski
When I met Trina White, general manager of the Parkside Hotel & Spa in Victoria, British Columbia, at the Beyond Green Global Leadership Summit in early March, it quickly became clear she wasn't like the other hoteliers in attendance.
It wasn't her passion for sustainability that made her stand out. That was table stakes among the Beyond Green member hotels gathered for this event.
What distinguished White was the context in which she operates. While many attendees represented more remote, ultraluxe resorts, some charging four-figure rates, the Parkside is an urban hotel playing at a far more accessible price point. (A recent search for a weekend stay in June, for example, surfaced entry-level pricing of around $400 per night.)
Yet despite these differences, the Parkside's innovations had some luxury resort operators taking notes.
"The whole goal of the Parkside is to showcase how you can be sustainable and even move toward being regenerative in a city center, mass hotel," said White. "It can be done."
Trina White
Known affectionately as "Green Girl" by local industry peers, White studied sciences in college with plans to go into reforestation. She pivoted in 1998, however, after a stint as an Outward Bound tour guide sparked an interest in ecotourism.
She eventually earned a master's degree in sustainable tourism management, and when the Parkside opened in 2009 as the first LEED Platinum building in Canada, White had found her perfect match.
Among the hotel's more innovative elements is its climate control system. The Parkside uses koi ponds as part of what White described as "a continuous water loop."
"We don't have any air conditioning, and so we are cooled by a water loop that runs through the hotel," White said. The cold pond water circulates through the building's walls, absorbing heat before returning to the ponds for cooling.
"And when it gets added back into the ponds, it's this burst of warmth for the fish -- they love it," said White.
Another ingenuity is the hotel's use of a HeatSavr Liquid Pool Cover for its 82-foot lap pool. This liquid cover forms an invisible molecular layer on the surface, helping to combat evaporation and maintain temperature without additional energy use.
"When you swim, the molecules separate, and then they come back together again, so it creates this sort of unseen film across the top of the pool," said White, adding that this solution doesn't impact the guest experience.
These days, however, White and her team are developing the hotel's most revolutionary concept yet: dynamic pricing tied to carbon footprint. White said the system would display each room option's carbon intensity alongside its price, enabling guests to make more environmentally informed booking decisions.
The concept would take a variety of factors into consideration, including natural gas usage, electricity consumption and staff commuting patterns. Notably, White pointed out that a hotel actually operates most efficiently at full occupancy, due to economies of scale.
This means a Friday-night stay during high-demand periods might actually have a lower carbon footprint than a Monday night when the hotel is less full but still maintaining operations throughout the building.
The system would also offer guests transparent information at the booking stage. For example, a standard rate with daily housekeeping might have a higher carbon footprint than a "green rate" that skips housekeeping, which would be reflected in both price and environmental-impact data.
"There's this perception that very sustainable properties are those smaller, boutique properties that are more exclusive in their rates," she said. "But to really make a change and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as an industry, it's about focusing on larger tourism [operators] like large hotels and how can they reduce their footprint."