Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts was recently honored by the National Park Service for its outstanding accomplishments in the preservation and protection of Grand Canyon and Yosemite national parks. The company earned Environmental Achievement Awards for reducing the Yosemite Transportation System’s petroleum use and for its remodel of the Canyon Village Marketplace it operates. This is the third consecutive year that the NPS has recognized Delaware North with this award.
At Yosemite National Park, Delaware North significantly reduced petroleum fuel use with diesel-electric hybrid trams and a no-idling policy for company vehicles. They didn’t stop with reducing fuel consumption but also targeted greenhouse gas reductions. Delaware North also created and implemented a ride share program for employees who commute from outside Yosemite Valley and refurbished and provided 15 bikes for employee use at the park, showing the type of environmental stewardship that’s expected from a world-class green meeting destination. read more…
ENJOY THIS GUEST POST by CPS Events at The Plaza, a joint venture between Great Performances, New York’s prestigious event and catering company, and Delaware North Companies, who opened the landmark Grand Ballroom at the famous Plaza Hotel in January 2008 and manages the Grand Ballroom, the Ballroom Foyer, the Terrace Room, and the new meeting spaces. It is CPS Events’ mission to deliver a new standard in catering and service that pays proper homage to the world-famous property while honoring a commitment to sustainability.
Over 100 years ago, The Plaza Hotel opened its door for New Yorkers and the world. Though the hotel represented the ultimate in fine living, the food it served was local, with the exception of luxury fare like caviar and fine European wines. Fish and fowl, lamb, beef and pork, fresh produce and dairy products; were all sourced from regional growers. It was a time of a vibrant and healthy local food system. As the decades passed, particularly by mid-century, food ways changed. Family farms, local growers and small-scale food production began to give way to mass production and factory farming. Food traveled from farther and farther distances until eventually the average item on a plate was sourced from 1,500 miles away.
Our stewardship of the ballroom began as the hotel marked its Centennial birthday. It coincided with another new chapter in our lives at Great Performances as we had bought a 60-acre property and established Katchkie Farm – an organic farm in New York’s fabled Hudson Valley. Our thriving crops boast tomatoes, dozens of lettuces and herbs, onions and garlic, hearty greens, root veggies (carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, etc.) and lots more. What we don’t produce, our neighbors with orchards, livestock and dairies do. As we conceptualized the menu for the Grand Ballroom, we thought: what would be more appropriate than to serve a 100 Mile Menu in a 100-year-old building?
Our Opening Party in July 2008 reflected the bounty of the season and included hors d’oeuvres like striped bass escaviche with Katchkie Farm beets as well Hudson Valley foie gras on brioche served with rhubarb chutney. The Farmer’s Chopped Salad featured only what was fresh and ready to be picked at Katchkie Farm along with our own 100 Mile Red Wine Vinaigrette. The dinner buffet offered fresh local oysters prepared “Casino” style, Kinderhook-raised pork sausage and sweet peppers, Hawthorne Valley sautéed rainbow trout with Roxbury Farm smoked sweet corn brûlee, and more. read more…
Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts has set our environmental stewardship goals for the coming year. Here’s a glimpse from each property. What sustainability goals are you setting for a better 2011?
The Lodge at Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio
- “Although all of our meetings are various shades of green, we will do even more in 2011 to share GreenPath Meetings information with our group business so that our meeting guests are well informed on how they can work with us to reduce their environmental impact.”
Gideon Putnam Resort, New York
- “We’ll be creative in new ways to reduce waste. For instance, usually the soap provided to guests isn’t completely used, so we’ll identify ways to recycle it.”
Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa, B.C.
- “More isn’t always better; we’re aiming for a 10 percent reduction over the next year in the amount of cleaning materials used by educating our team on just how much product needs to be used to get the job done.”
Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite, California
- “More can be better when it’s more green meetings! We’re going to increase GreenPath Meeting adoption by continually adding new and fresh ideas to our GreenPath Meetings packages and programs.” read more…
Smart Meetings, one of the meeting and event planning industry’s largest publications, recently chose Tenaya Lodge as a Platinum Choice Award recipient for meeting facilities. Tenaya, selected for its excellence in service and meeting amenities, was one of only 100 properties chosen for the prestigious award out of the thousand qualified meeting places in the Western U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Over a two-month period, Smart Meetings readers rated properties’ ambience, amenities, facility quality, guest services, meeting space, restaurant and dining facilities, staff attitude, technical support and recreational activities. The reader-voting results were coupled with picks from a panel of industry experts to determine the top Western hotels and meeting venues.
The meeting space at Tenaya was recently expanded and now features 14 meeting rooms comprising 15,000 square feet of meeting space and 4,500 square feet of pre-function space. Complimenting the meeting spaces are a 10,000 square foot ballroom and the 3,000 square foot indoor-outdoor Signature Grand Terrace. Tenaya Lodge has been recognized for excellence before, winning AAA’s Four Diamond hotel award and a Best of the West Award, among others.
To learn more about holding a green meeting at Tenaya Lodge , visit www.tenayalodge.com.
Green meetings and the GreenPath® Meetings program are part of a rich tradition of sustainable hospitality programs at Delaware North.
We established GreenPath® in 1993 following our successful bid for the largest concessions contract in the National Park Service: Yosemite. Among the companies that bid on the Yosemite contract, ours expressed a willingness to accept the challenge and financial burden of mitigating 30 deteriorating underground storage tanks put in place by former concessioners.
GreenPath® soon spread to Delaware North’s other parks and resorts, and in 2001, it became the first environmental management system of a U.S. hospitality company to be registered to the standards put forth by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 14001).
Since then, the program has received more than 40 awards from the likes of NASA, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, the U.S. Travel Association, the state of California and IMEX. Listen to Deb Friedel, director of sustainability for Delaware North Companies and John Huey, director of environmental affairs, talk about the importance of sustainability and Delaware North’s environmental program, GreenPath®.
Today, Delaware North has countless other important environmental initiatives underway throughout its sporting, entertainment and airport locations, which include Delaware North-owned and -operated TD Garden in Boston and the new Daytona Beach Kennel Club & Poker Room, which meets LEED’s coveted gold standard.
More recently, we announced our intention to again raise the environmental bar. The Delaware North operation in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport has become the first airport concessions operation to achieve ISO 14001 registration, closely followed by Nashville International Airport as the second.
The GreenPath Meetings program is just one of many industry-leading sustainability initiatives across our parks and resorts operations and the rest of our divisions. We thought you should know!
We believe that good choices lead to success. For us, one of those choices is being responsible in how we care for special places, whether it’s Wuksachi Lodge at Sequoia National Park, the Queen Mary in Long Beach, or historic Gideon Putnam Resort in Saratoga Springs. So we were particularly pleased to have that success confirmed when Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts recently made both Hotel Business’ list of top 100 owners and developers and Hotel & Motel Management’s annual ranking of top hotel managers.
Wuksachi Lodge guest room in Sequoia National Park, California
“Guests come to Delaware North properties to experience one-of-a-kind destinations and the stories that live in and around them,” said Kevin Kelly, the division’s president. “It has been our operating strategy from the beginning. We believe in it and think it makes good business sense. It’s rewarding to be reminded from time to time that we’re on track.”
Both publications base their rankings on the number of guest rooms a company has in its portfolio. Delaware North is number 82 on Hotel & Motel Management’s list of top hotel companies, published this month, with 2,900 guest rooms (owned and managed) in the United States. Worldwide data is also included, although it is not a factor in the ranking. The company currently has 4,000 hotel rooms worldwide, including locations as diverse as Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa in British Columbia, Canada, and Wilson Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Courtesy of Prentiss Photography
In September, Sonia Di Fiore and Brett Watts celebrated their marriage at The Lodge at Geneva-on-the-Lake overlooking Lake Erie in Ohio. And the couple found that accommodating both their large, kid-friendly guest list and vegan, eco-conscious lifestyle was easier than they thought. From a mostly vegan and organic menu to the bicycle surrey that served as the couple’s “get-away car,” the wedding weekend was a perfect example of great entertaining with earth-friendly, sustainable choices.
Working with the resort’s catering staff, Sonia and Brett created an Italian/ Mediterranean-style feast that incorporated seasonal, local and organic foods including fresh figs and raspberries. Except for two sustainable seafood entrée options, the rest of the menu was completely vegan—no eggs or dairy in the appetizers, side dishes or vegetarian entrée. read more…
Every Delaware North property has a GreenPath team. At the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, Director of Facilities Jorge Gonzalez and E-commerce Manager Preeti Narang lead the effort.
“I chose to help implement GreenPath at the Queen Mary because environmental stewardship has always been really important to me. I’m excited to be making an impact in my workplace and for our guests,” says Gonzalez, who has worked on the ship for 30 years.
Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts took the helm of the former cruise ship in September 2009. The company has made many improvements to the ship’s art deco meeting salons and 314 staterooms through significant renovations, but one of the stand-out improvements is the ship’s transition to a more sustainable hospitality model. read more…
“The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.” -Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States
It’s fitting that the staff in Yellowstone National Park were among those responsible for creating the area’s first recycling program in 1996, and building an industrial-grade composting facility just outside the park. Working with partners in the community and private companies such as Delaware North, the recycling program enabled America’s first national park to substantially reduce the amount of trash generated each year that then went to landfills. Reducing trash not only has its own environmental benefits, it helps save the routinely underfunded park more than $100,000 each year in solid waste management costs and has cut the park’s waste disposal costs in half. That recycling venture, Headwaters Cooperative Recycling, Inc., is responsible for all recycling for a 35,000 square-mile area.
One of the reasons for the program’s success is how energetically park staff and concessioners like Delaware North have promoted recycling. Park and private employees encourage recycling through conversations with visitors, and visitors see signs and receive pamphlets urging use of the bear-proof steel recycling bins for paper, cardboard, aluminum, plastic, glass and steel—even small propane tanks! read more…
Tourism and hospitality leaders want to make your vacations and business travel a “greener” experience. Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts has joined with global environmental and travel organizations, suppliers, media and CMIGreen to produce a comprehensive Green Travel Survey. Your important feedback will help airlines, cruise lines, hotels, tour operators and destinations make their operations and communications greener.
Please take a moment now to take the new Green Travel Survey. Your feedback really matters! Please also send the link to your friends and colleagues, and ask them to complete their survey by August 31st.
Simply click or paste www.greentravelsurvey.com into your browser.
The survey is formatted to respect your privacy. Your answers are strictly confidential — none of the information you provide will be used for marketing purposes, nor will you be added to any lists without your optional, express consent at the conclusion of the survey.
Completing the online survey takes only 12-15 minutes, and as an incentive to complete it by August 31, TEN WINNERS will receive a choice of a $50 Amazon gift card, or a $50 donation to the charity of your choice.