Leaving the lights on for guests at your hotel maybe a homey welcome to your establishment but it will be an unwelcome sight when your utility bill comes at the end of the billing cycle. Utility costs represent the fastest growing operating costs for hoteliers–increasing 12% per year–and are one of the most controllable expenses. In a time of consistent rate increases and the summer peak demand season, it’s the dawn for hoteliers to find new ways of reducing operating costs while delighting guests.
Higher effective room rates and higher guest satisfaction is the ultimate win-win.
On average, America’s 47,000 hotels spend $2,196 per room each year on energy or approximately 6% of all operating costs. Reducing energy consumption by 10% is the equivalent to raising room rates by $1.35 in a full service hotel. According to JD Power and Associates, guest satisfaction is higher when they are aware that a hotel employs energy savings programs.
In the past, hoteliers have used hardware-only solutions to assist them in their energy management programs. A report by Navigant Consulting documents a fundamental shift from standalone hardware to software-as-a-service systems with data aggregation, analysis, and reporting capabilities. From 2012-2020 Navigant expects the market for hotel energy management software to increase over 100%.
Enter Gridium’s utility data analytics. Our touchless solutions (no software or hardware installation needed) are used by a dozen hotels, and our first hotel client found enough savings in its 30-day no-commit free trial to fund continuing the service for two years. Below is a screenshot from one of our hotel customers using Snapmeter, which identifies anomalous energy use and predicts the days when peak demand charges will be set.
The off-hours demand spike our software caught at 2:30am might otherwise have gone unnoticed. But automatic monitoring and Monday morning summary emails from Snapmeter lets hoteliers sleep with the same comfort as their guests.
After all of the hard work, processes, and retrofits that go into hotel energy management systems, our Billcast tool quantifies the causes of monthly utility bill variance. So even if the utility bill is going up because of uncontrollable factors like increased rates, additional calendar days in the billing period, or abnormal weather, Gridium hotels can still report when their operations are driving down energy costs:
The era of leaving the lights on for guests is over. Effective energy management programs at hotels not only lower operating costs but increase guest satisfaction. Gridium tools enable hoteliers the ability to lower energy expenditures and document the success of their efforts. Please drop us a note if you’d like to learn more.
