Posted on 09/18/2003 12:45:25 PM PDT by hoosierskypilot
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - From New York to California, small and mid-size hotels have gone smoke-free, cleaning, deodorizing and redecorating rooms once reserved for smokers and designating them nonsmoking.
One major reason is that fewer guests are requesting smoking rooms. But hotel managers point to other benefits: lower room maintenance costs and a marketing tool at a time when the business has been hurt by a sluggish economy.
"In all of our publications, we promote a smoke-free environment, and we've gotten calls because of it. Families with kids, it's attractive to them. It reinforces cleanliness and safety," said Chris Canavos, manager of the 98-room Howard Johnson's in Williamsburg, Va., which went smoke-free during a renovation three years ago.
In New York City, which banned smoking in restaurants and bars over the summer, the 79-room Comfort Inn Midtown in the theater district just marked its second smoke-free year. For the first seven months of this year, the Comfort Inn's occupancy rate has been a strong 96 percent.
Nonsmoker Leon Der Bogosian, a jewelry wholesaler from Los Angeles who frequently travels on business, stays at the Comfort Inn Midtown an average of eight times a year. Of the smoke-free policy, he said: "I'm bound to them because of that."
"Clean air, that's the main thing for me," he said. When he recently stayed in Detroit, his nonsmoking room was on a floor with smoking rooms, and "from the elevator to the room, you could smell cigarettes."
Vijay Dandapani, chief operating officer of Apple Core Hotels, which runs the Comfort Inn Midtown, said that on average, maids have to spend an extra five minutes cleaning a smoking room, including emptying the ashtrays and scrubbing the smoke residue that settles on everything.
Moreover, hotel managers point out, the drapes, the carpets, the bedding and other furnishings need to be replaced more frequently in smoking rooms, because smokers burn holes in the furniture and cause other damage.
The switchover to no smoking also gives hotels more flexibility: Normally, when hotels are close to full, nonsmoking guests are offered smoking rooms. To many nonsmokers, that stinks. They are repelled by the hard-to-remove cigarette smell.
Many bars, restaurants and workplaces across the country have gone smoke-free over the past several years. John Banzhaf, an anti-smoking activist and professor of public interest law at George Washington University, calls hotels one of the last holdouts.
"I definitely think it will be a continuing and accelerating trend," he said. "I think hotels will try to distinguish themselves and try to provide some added value for their guests, and they'll be successful at it."
According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of major U.S. urban markets, rooms for smokers account for 16 percent of all hotel rooms, a drop of 4 percentage points over the past five years.
In addition to New Jersey, New York and Virginia, smoke-free hotels can also be found in Delaware, California and Oklahoma, said Jeff Higley, editor in chief of the industry journal Hotel & Motel Management. There are an estimated 4.4 million hotel rooms in the United States.
Just over a month ago in Basking Ridge, about a half-hour drive west of New York City, the 171-room North Maple Inn dropped the last of its rooms for smokers. The North Maple, which caters to Fortune 500 travelers and wedding parties, now charges a $250 cleaning fee to guests who light up in their rooms - the amount the hotel says it costs to get rid of the smell.
Smokers at the North Maple are free to use five outdoor areas, including a courtyard where they can order drinks.
Some North Maple guests attending a recent corporate conference huddled outside a side entrance, chatting over a morning cigarette.
New Yorker Jonathan Smith said the policy was most bothersome just before bedtime and first thing in the morning. After putting up with the policy for three days, the 27-year smoker said: "I feel like I've been here my whole life."
Audrey Silk of the New York group Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment does not welcome the trend either: "A hotel is where you go to relax. If they're telling me I can't smoke in my room, that's not a vacation."
No doubt. It's called their "home."
Seriesly, though, I attended military school and they wouldn't let us smoke in our barracks. We had to smoke outside while walking in formation (the "smoke pen"). There was an officer's smoking pen, and one for the rest. Plus, you could only smoke at designated times during the day.
What think ye? Would smokers go for it?
I did while I was in the military. Especially in boot camp.
As a civilian, if I go somewhere that the owner has designated as no smoking, I won't smoke.
If I go somewhere that the owner allows smoking, depending on the situation, I don't hesitate to light up.
You could be right, you could be wrong.
and I think they would be upset by anything restricting smoking.
I, personally, have no problem with smoking restrictions, as long as they are not mandated by govt agencies and are put in place by the property owner.
Am I the exception, or the rule?
Yea, that's what my mother said during 30 years of her smoking life. Then, when she developed lung cancer, boom! She quit. Didn't do any good, though. It was terminal.
People simply need enough incentive to do a thing, sometimes.
My favorite above all (cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and leaf tobacco) was skoal. I loved finding a fresh batch that was so moist it literally burned my cheek. Then came the "buzz." I never had sufficient incentive to quit. But now, at $6.50 a can? That would be sufficient (if I hadn't already quit via nicorette; I chewed that stuff for four years).
I wasn't arguing, just passing along a bit of information I came across.
They don't just do this with furnishings from the smoking rooms, they do this with the furnishings of all the rooms. I'm not certain why.
I realize that my own sense of smell is somewhat compromised by my smoking but the wife and daughters is not.
We have been in smoking rooms that my wife and daughters could not tell if tobacco had been smoked in the room or not.
It was in 4 and 5 star hotels but nonetheless...
Sounds funny, let me know if you see any.
Though Big Antitobacco (trial lawyers, professional "charity" shakedown/Democratic Party supporters like the American Cancer Society, etc.) doesn't want you to know about it, the reality is that tobacco just is nowhere near as dangerous as they'd deluded everyone into believing, especially if you're not genetically predisposed to such things as lung cancer.
Note that I'm not saying use of tobacco products has no risk or health detriments whatsoever; it obviously does. But the reality is that the vast majority of regular tobacco users will never have to deal with any serious health problem that can be directly tied to tobacco use. (Did you know that if you acquire any sort of cardiovascular disease, your heart problem is AUTOMATICALLY lumped into the statistics as a "tobacco-related disease" if you ever smoked regularly at any point in your life? Even if you don't get it until you're 90? Even though there is not one iota of direct evidence that your heart problem wasn't caused by genetic predisposition, old age, or anything else?)
It's a tradeoff, for sure. A heavy smoker is pretty certain to have a problem running marathons, and the odds of you getting something as a result of tobacco use are definitely a lot better than they are of winning the lottery. (I believe the lung cancer rate amongst lifetime heavy smokers is 1 in 100, for example. But I bet most people think the lung cancer rate is more like 1 in 5.)
George Burns smoked like a fiend, and lived to 100. Andy Kaufman never touched a cigarette in his life and died of a particularly nasty form of lung cancer at age 35. The connections just are not as simple and clear-cut as Big Antitobacco has tricked you into believing.
By the way, they're about to start offering a test to let you see if you have the gene that makes you particularly susceptible to lung cancer. It's going to become very interesting over the next couple of decades, as science and technology advance forward and discover new ways to treat, cure and eventually prevent the medical problems caused by tobacco usage, at the same time as tobacco companies manage to develop truly safer cigarettes. The libs are going to have complete breakdowns in twenty years or so when teenagers start taking up smoking again in droves because most of the risks have been eliminated, and the public starts demanding to be allowed to smoke in public again.
/hyperbole
No, smokers think that if there's no visible smoke, then there's no longer even the potential of any health threat to the next guest. You see, when the "studies" decrying the health threat of second hand smoke were thoroughly debunked, the anti-smoking crusade had to quietly adopt the "we just don't like the smell" line. Hoosierskypilot has somewhat more adroitly adopted the dual "it's for the children/it keeps my taxes high" gambit. Both are lacking, in my opinion. Which one do you subscribe to?
The hotel room was probably the only place the poor sap had left in which to smoke.
That's what killed my mother, too. Only, I thought it was "oat cell." No matter.
But, you're right. Our folks grew up in a time when cigarettes were advertised as helping one breath better. Now we know better.
That's why I'm amazed when I read about smoking being on the rise among teenagers.
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