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."
Number two - Would you care to share some of the studies and such that you get your numbers from?
I'm afraid that you are using some incorrect data, knowingly or unknowingly.
In answer to your question, go here.
What planet do you come from?
Fascism is fascism whether you agree with it or not.
You can either support fascism, which it sounds like you do, or work against fascism.
The property owner should have the decision to allow, or not allow, the smoking of a legal product on their property.
I support that. I may not spend my money there if they don't allow smoking but I will not 'give 'em he!!' about it. It's their decision.
I know fanatics, controlling small people, specially senile ones are immune to facts.
But just on the off chance that I might be wrong, check this out:
FreeRepublic.com "A Conservative News Forum"
Click to scroll to commentary.
Second-hand Smoke is Harmful to Science
Scripps Howard News Service/www.fumento.com ^ | 11 SEPT 03 | Michael Fumento
Posted on 09/16/2003 4:39 AM PDT by historian1944
Second-hand Smoke is Harmful to Science By Michael Fumento Scripps Howard News Service, Sept. 11, 2003 Copyright 2003 Scripps Howard News Service
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Looking for a surer method of being ripped apart than entering a lion's den covered with catnip? Conduct the most exhaustive, longest-running study on second-hand smoke and death. Find no connection. Then rather than being PC and hiding your data in a vast warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, publish it in one of the world's most respected medical journals.
That's what research professor James Enstrom of UCLA and professor Geoffrey Kabat of the State University of New York, Stony Brook discovered last May. That's when they reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that their 39-year study of 35,561 Californians who had never smoked showed no "causal relationship between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and tobacco-related mortality," adding, however "a small effect" can't be ruled out.
At this writing there have been over 140 responses on www.bmj.com, and if made into a movie they would be called "The Howling." Many are mere slurs several grades below even sophomoric.
Some demanded the BMJ retract the study because, as one put it, the "tobacco industry will use it." (It didn't). Another made the rather draconian call to ban all use of statistics in science, lest they be put to such wicked purposes as this.
"It is astounding how much of the criticism springs from (personal attacks) rather than from scientific criticism of the study itself," observed one of the few supportive writers. Said another: "As a publisher of the leading Austrian medical online news service, I feel quite embarrassed following the debate on this article. Many postings look more like a witch hunt than a scientific debate."
Sadly, one of the most pathetic responses came from Dr. Michael Thun, vice president for epidemiology and surveillance research at the American Cancer Society. The ACS started the study and formerly collaborated with the authors. Thun claimed that since there was so much exposure to smokers back in the 1950s and 1960s that essentially everybody was a second-hand smoker.
This logic puts the wife of a two-pack-a-day husband in the same category as somebody who once stumbled into a smoky bar. It negates all ETS studies based on spousal exposure including those serving Thun's purposes. But based on the subjects' own recollection decades later in the UCLA study, spousal smoking was indeed a good indicator of their total exposure to second-hand smoke.
One refrain running through the attacks is, "Why take seriously a study that contradicts what everyone already knows?" But "what everyone knows" is wrong. It's the UCLA study that's very much in the majority.
A 1999 Environmental Health Perspectives survey of 17 ETS-heart disease studies found only five that were statistically significantly positive. ("Statistical significance" refers to whether an increased or decreased risk falls outside the bounds of what could be expected by chance.) The lead author? Why, Michael Thun!
Likewise, a 2002 analysis of 48 studies regarding a possible ETS link to lung cancer found 10 that were significantly positive, one that was actually significantly negative, and 37 that like Enstrom and Kabat's were insignificant either way.
This glass of "pure spring" water contains traces of both cyanide and arsenic, but in levels far too low to cause harm. The reason active tobacco smoking could be such a terrible killer while ETS may cause no deaths lies in the dictum "the dose makes the poison." We are constantly bombarded by carcinogens, but in tiny amounts the body usually easily fends them off.
A New England Journal of Medicine study found that even back in 1975 - when having smoked obnoxiously puffed into your face was ubiquitous in restaurants, cocktail lounges, and transportation lounges – the concentration was equal to merely 0.004 cigarettes an hour. In scientific terminology, that's called a "tiny amount."
Unable to find significant faults in the UCLA study itself, critics repeatedly harped on what Enstrom and Kabat had clearly stated – that some of the funding was from the tobacco industry. As they explained, this became necessary when the University of California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, which was specifically set up to support this type of research, stopped their funding and no other sources were available.
The big bucks go to those who "discover" that ETS causes everything from pimples to piles. Both governmental and private organizations have directed tens of millions of dollars to groups promoting ETS as a killer, perhaps even a greater killer than active smoking! Meanwhile Big Tobacco has essentially extinguished its efforts on ETS, reserving new spending and political capital for other fights.
So give the BMJ and Enstrom and Kabat an "F" for political correctness. But give them an "A" for honesty and courage.
Disclaimer: Neither Michael Fumento nor the Hudson Institute receive money from tobacco interests.
Read Michael Fumento's other work on smoking.
Michael Fumento is the author of numerous books. His next book, BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, will be published in October 2003 by Encounter Books.
Next you will be called names and the poster will pretend this is all just some bizarre joke and that he really loves property rights.
Only the marginal ones.
If a hotel was so negligent in ventilating and cleaning their rooms regularly, this would not be the case.
You are lucky. That room was filthy aside for the smoking issue. Take a black light with you sometime.
I have never experienced that, but then perhaps I am not as frugal ignorant and unconscious.
Actually, that's what the article said, viz., hotels are exercising their option of going smokeless. It's the marketplace. No govt interference, there.
A few hysterical posters began whining about fascism. I was just pulling their chains. :)
What IS germane to the discussion is whether the government, ANY government (fed, state, county, municiple) is entitled to tell a property owner what legal substances they can allow to be used on private property.
The govt, when proposing a ban on smoking, has not, yet, supported licensing. All the govt says is (paraphrasing), "You may not allow any of your paying customers to use this legal substance on your property". And doing it on the basis of junk science in regards to ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke).
The three largest studies in the world, one by the World health organization and one sponsered by the American Cancer Society for 38 of the 40 years it went, both concluded that there was no statistical relevance in regards to ETS and ANY type of disease.
You are being kind.
The fraud is more thorough than that!
If someone crashes into a bridge abutment at 120 MPH and dies, and there are cigarettes in the car it is listed among the 500,000.
If the dead person ever smoked likewise.
If the dead person ever lived in a household where smoking took place it is included.
If the dead person is 105, it is also part of their figure.
We are talking fraud at a spectacular level...
Dr. Garrett Adams, associate professor of pediatrics emeritus at the University of Louisville, said the ties are "well documented and staggering."
He said children in smoking households have an increased chance of dying of sudden infant death syndrome, or of developing asthma and other illnesses.
And Dr. Robert Goodin, a cardiologist, said more than 8,000 people die in Kentucky of smoking-related illnesses each year, 1,000 of them because of passive smoke.
He accused the cigarette industry of fighting the ban because people in states and cities with such smoking bans are four times as likely to quit smoking as those where smoking is allowed in workplaces.
Some questioned whether there is truly a "right" to smoke, as claimed by many opponents of a ban — and if there is such a right, whether it outweighs their right to breathe clean air.
"A person has to breathe to live," Stephanie Kellerman said. "I can't just stop breathing because someone wants to smoke."
The quote comes from Louisville, KY, which is soon to implement anti-smoking legislation. For more info, try this article.
And they can't prove ANY of it about ETS.
For a first hand smoker there are some risk factors involved. I think that almost every smoker on this forum will agree with that.
What I take exception to is when the govt demands that private property owners cannot allow legal activities on their own property.
If you can't tell the difference between unsupported opinion, apocryphal inventions and decades-long scientific studies, we are wasting out time.
Perhaps you should better spend your time getting your GED.
Better late than never.
Have a nice day.
Why is it that I have been in both types of smoking rooms? I have been in rooms that smell like a stale ashtray, I have also been in rooms that a nonsmoker would never know had been smoked in.
My own personal observations, the better the hotel, the less of a smokey aftersmell.
Is it better ventilation? Is it a more attentive staff? Is it that the furnishings are replaced?
I've asked hotel management about it and have been told that they don't replace furnishings in smoking rooms any more frequently that any other room. The better hotels, however, do rotate furnishings throughout the hotel, so you may be sitting on a chair or couch that has been in a smoking room and not even know it.
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