With links to so many globally impactful human activities, such as transportation, lodging, foodservice and agriculture, the tourism industry is uniquely positioned to effect a paradigm shift toward this thing called sustainability. Buzzword though it is, sustainability has perhaps too many potential concrete applications to be easily defined in abstract terms. With a certain root sense of lasting or enduring, and more current denotations that are important in a global way, sustainability can be manifested in many real ways through business.

Finding myself motivated by applications of this concept in hospitality businesses, I set upon a mini-quest during the summer, making a series of five visits to hotels that do it well.

In the What’s Different Series, I will recount site visits and room-nights in hotels that have incorporated a commitment to sustainability into their communications and business identities, with the goal of identifying just what’s different? In…