A great article by Omar J. Sakr, in the Hospitality News Magazine, gives a detailed picture of Lebanon’s Hotel industry as per the introduction of environmental practices.

The author talks about the major findings of his recent field research conducted in Lebanon between June 2010 and January 2011, which show that international hotel chains in Lebanon are more likely to implement environmental practices than local ones. This research also identified different barriers that are not allowing hotels to fully adopt environmentally friendly practices. The major identified barriers were the financial resources of the hotel, the lack of national infrastructure, the lack of awareness among managers and staff, the lack of awareness among guests, the lack of expertise in applying EMS (Environmental Management Systems), and finally the lack of compliance with the existing legislation, which is not compulsory in most of the cases.

75% of international chain hotels in Lebanon are implementing environmental practices with 50% of them implementing formal EMS; the results of the local and regional hotels have shown that only 16% of these hotels are implementing some types of environmental practices and the remaining hotels of this category are mostly implementing energy saving measures.

Not all the hotels managed by international chains are implementing what their mother companies have already achieved in other markets. They are likely to introduce different environmental practices and at varying levels. One of these hotels had not introduced any environmental action, while another hotel has a Responsible Business Manager; other hotels generally assigned environmental policies and practices to the engineering manager

The managers of international hotel chains showed more interest in implementing environmental practices then the managers of local hotels, mainly as a result of the culture of the mother company and the economies of scale at which their companies operate. It is worth pointing out that none of the rurally located hotels, which are individually owned, participated in the survey. The lack of environmental management is the most probable reason for this. The full article is available here.