Lyndon Sanders was entrepreneurial in the hotel industry 30 years ago. Given the fact that his father, uncle and 12 close friends had died of smoking, he decided to open a hotel called, “The Non-Smokers Inn” in an attempt to reduce the amount of smoking in hotels for many reasons. First, smokers and non-smokers would often alternate rooms, and in order to keep the quality of the hotel up to the non-smokers standards, they would have to “take the draperies down, shampoo the carpet, strip the beds completely down—even the plaster shower curtains.” He then went on to say, “You should see the yellow nicotine stains on the cleaning rags. I tell you, it would gag a buzzard.”
That being said, the hotel industry was focused on maximum profits and people told him he was “nuts when he announced that he was building a hotel in which guests would not be permitted to smoke.” Even though that idea may have seem farfetched in that time, more recently, hotels have taken huge strides to provide their guests with non-smoking floors, and sometimes even took on Sanders idea of non-smoking hotels all together. There has recently been some legislations passed about smoking in hotels. It was said that now, “more than 12,900 lodgings in the U.S. now allow no smoking at all in any of their rooms—nearly 4,600 than the figure was in 2008.
It seems obvious that Sanders was ahead of his time. It is crazy to see that it took 30 plus years to see significant changes in the hotel industry when it came to smoking, but nonetheless, change did happen. This is a great example of an entrepreneur who saw the need for change in an industry, and took it upon himself to open up the “Non-Smokers Inn.” It will be interesting to see what other changes are made in the hotel industry in the next few years. I would expect the majority of hotels to convert to 100% non-smoking hotels, and require their guests to smoke outside. It seems like it would take a hit on the companies profit if they consistently need to clean the smoking rooms.
I personally believe that every hotel should enforce a non-smoking policy in order to maintain a healthy environment. Their is a benefit to enforcing the policy since hotels would have to worry about less cost of damages done by smokers. The hotel could force smokers to smoke outside, providing a clean environment to their clientele. I agree with this post a lot, good job Jared!
ReplyDelete