Regional hotels plug into sustainability with EV chargers

Last June, Daphne Dixon set out from Fairfield on a cross-country road trip in a Mustang Mach-E. The dark electric vehicle (EV) muscle car took her and a companion 5,000 miles across the country while visiting 27 cities in 15 states. Dixon was serving as a representative of the Connecticut Southwestern Area Clean Cities Coalition, part of the Live Green Network, and she met with representatives of other organizations in the network.

The road trip, undertaken during some of the highest gas prices in recent history, was considered a success by Dixon, the executive director and co-founder of Live Green Connecticut. Dixon used the trip to show that range anxiety ”” the fear many have that electric vehicles can’t handle long distance drives ”” was overblown.

Yet the experience revealed new challenges that hotels need to overcome as they bolster sustainability efforts.

“What we found was that while some hotels had charging stations at their facilities,” Dixon said, “the hotel staff, although they were very nice and wanted to help, really didn’t understand anything about the charging stations themselves. So, if you had a question about it or you had an issue or a problem nobody at the staff level could really help.”

Dixon described times where meters had continued running overnight after the car was fully charged, resulting in $150 bills for a few dollars’ worth of electricity. The car had stopped charging after a couple hours but remained plugged in without drawing power, racking up a $20 an hour bill ”” in that case, the front desk staff had not been instructed in the operation of the charging system.

Experiences like that at hotels, even some billed as sustainable, prompted Dixon and her organization to put together a multipoint rating system for hotel charging stations.

“We’re going to do a program with hotels in Connecticut to use what we learned from our road trip to help educate hotel staff and lodging facilities on what they need to do to get their hotels EV ready,” she said.

The result is the Hospitality EV Readiness Toolkit, which is set for an early 2023 launch. This toolkit is designed to help hotels assess where they stand on nine points determining ease of use for EV owners.

The toolkit may become increasingly important in an industry where customers are considering sustainability a must in choosing accommodations, even short overnight stays in transit. Google has begun including an “eco-certified” label on listings for hotels in search results and is building out its own sustainability ratings and providing guides to the sustainable offerings featured at a given location.

Many hotel guests are increasingly drawn to hotels that can boast about ethically sourced food, high-efficiency showers, locally sourced soaps, recycled materials and carbon offsets. These things serve as both a mark of high quality and modernity, but a way to ease the guilt of the eco-conscious worried about the environmental impact of their trip.

Locally, a greater emphasis on sustainability is underway at the former Westport Inn. The Delamar luxury hotel brand, already a name among those seeking a getaway in Greenwich or Southport, recently received approval to move forward with a plan to completely revamp this venue with new HVAC units, new windows, and an all-new floorplan. According to Dixon Mallory, director of business development at Clearview Investment Management, which owns and operates Delamar Hotels, these upgrades will both improve efficiency at the site and increase customer comfort.

Mallory said EV charging is also planned for the new location, as is already the case for their already operating hotels where Teslas serve as the courtesy car ”” although the choice of this particular automotive brand isn’t purely the result of sustainability efforts.

“There’s definitely a cool factor there,” he said with a laugh.

Elsewhere in Fairfield County, the J House in Greenwich is adding EV charging equipment to its grounds ”” a decision that was based on both guest convenience and hotel style, according to General Manager Janice Perna-Nichols.

“If you’ve ever been in our rooms,” Perna-Nichols said, “you’ve seen all of our technology. Everything is push button, we have high-tech Toto Japanese toilets. We’re a high-tech hotel so it really makes sense for us to have these.”

The EV chargers are part of the J House’s 10-year anniversary renovations and the installation expected to be completed in early November.

Across the state border, Mark Shuda, general manager of The Tarrytown House Estate in Tarrytown, is also focused discussed the worth of sustainability-minded offerings. The elegant hotel overlooking the Hudson Valley completed renovations in 2018 that included the installation of EV chargers.

“I have to say that every day they’re being used,” Shuda noted. “We probably need a few more, which we will probably install, but it’s really become a reality of keeping current, and with how things are going we need to expand that to provide a high level of service to our guests. It’s not just a matter of convenience, it’s really a requirement.”

Shuda noted that one of the most frequent questions fielded by the front desk from potential guests is whether the hotel has EV charging facilities. In his estimation the guests it has drawn have well offset the costs of installation.

At the Abbey Inn in Peekskill, the historic former convent and Episcopal Religious Community, good stewardship is corporate policy. General Manager Gilbert Baeriswil stated Hay Creek Hotels, the company operating the venue, has been “committed for years to providing EV charging stations at the hotels.”

Baeriswil noted that guests of the inn also enjoy a 10% discount on their booking rate when taking advantage of the Abbey’s Electric Charging offer.

The spread of EV chargers is also good news for Dixon and the Clean Cities Coalition ”” she said she was planning another EV road trip to visit the rest of the Live Green Network in summer 2023.