Tedd Saunders ’79
Why would hotels go green?
T
edd Saunders ’79 doesn’t like to say that he pioneered the green hotel movement. A third-generation hotelier, in 1989 he sold his family on the idea that they could reduce their environmental footprint, offer four-star service, and still make a profit. He wrote a book about how to do it and launched a consulting firm to spread his eco-friendly business ideas. Tedd’s hotels were the first in the United States to offer guests, among other things, the option of reusing towels and sheets for more than one night. He was ahead of his time when he came up with the idea of luxury, urban ecotourism in the late 1980s. The notion didn’t strike him in a steamy jungle—the place most people associate with ecotourism. He was in the maze-like basement of the 900-plus-room, million-square-foot Park Plaza Hotel watching huge pallets of products arriving and baled rubbish on the way to the trash. “I remember thinking that there had to be a better way to run a hotel than creating all this waste and consuming all this material,” he says. “Could we run our hotels in a responsible way that wouldn’t diminish the comfort and luxury of the guest experience?” Turns out that the Saunders Hotel Group could. Over the past 23 years, Tedd has earned a name for himself spearheading urban ecotourism. He launched the effort by measures such as finding a driver with a tractor-trailer willing to haul the Park Plaza’s 1,500 phone books to the city’s only recycling center. Today, he can count more than 100 separate, non-toxic, energysaving initiatives at the company’s six hotels, including a new electric-car charging station—the first curbside one in Boston— at the 113-year-old Lenox Hotel in Back Bay. The notion of a responsible company was a good fit, he explained, for a family business that cares about its legacy “not just for the next generation, but for the entire community.”
Still, when he was preparing to pitch the idea to his father, brothers, and the rest of the company’s executive board, he couldn’t find a model to point to of what is now known as “sustainable tourism.” “The initiative was a giant leap of faith for my family,” Tedd says. “None of us knew how big it would become.”
Tedd has earned a name for himself spearheading urban ecotourism. He launched the effort by measures such as finding a driver with a tractor-trailer willing to haul the Park Plaza’s 1,500 phone books to the city’s only recycling center. During a tour of the Lenox, Tedd glances at a well-worn, highlighted checklist. Moving from the elegant lobby, onto the elevator and into one of the spacious eleventh floor rooms, he mentions some of the amenities: superefficient heating and cooling systems; eco-friendly Herman Miller chairs; sustainably harvested paper products; reusable bottles with filtered water; and infrared motion-sensor thermostats. When the hotel couldn’t find energy-saving candelabra light bulbs for the hotel’s antique fixtures, they had them made. Spring 2013 11