As you may have surmised from the ads popping up on your favorite green websites this week, Rezhub.com has launched GreenTravelHub. A link on their home page promises “Find a hybrid car, book a green hotel, or go carbon neutral!” So how well does it work?
1. Pro: You get to choose which “green organization” receives a portion of the proceeds of every trip purchased through RezHub.com. (That's every trip -- not just "green" ones through the GreenTravelHub.) Vote here. The Conservation Fund is currently way ahead with 55 percent of the vote. Nice to give the power to the people, but...
Con: The vagueness concerns me. How much of their proceeds? And what will they do with the funds that come in while they are still deciding who gets the money? And will this seemingly nice gesture actually dissuade people from seeking out truly green options? “With us, all your travel is green,” they claim. This feels uncomfortably like green-washing to me.
2. Pro: The site’s “Green Score” system awards 3 points for harder actions (such as “support or use alternative energy”), 2 points for moderate actions (such as “participate in an energy conservation program”), and 1 point for simpler things like “uses re-usable service items.” It’s a smart way to give more weight to more important actions.
Con: Rezhub awards one green branch to any hotel that earns one to six points. (Two branches for seven to 12, three branches for 13 to 18, four branches for 19 to 24, and five branches for 25 to 30.) That means a hotel could put a ceramic coffee cup in your room instead of a Styrofoam one and get a green branch. Personally, I’d skip any low ranking green hotels and save your hard-earned for the four and five branch establishments.
3. Pro: Links to lists of green-ranked hotels in “popular destinations” in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, Mexico, and Australia.
Con: No advanced green search tool. You can check a box on Rezhub’s normal hotel search to only see “green” options. I’d like to be able to choose how many branches I require (or even which characteristics I find the most important), and have my tailored list served up for me.
4. Con: This one is just getting a con because I had such high hopes. I really wanted them to make renting a hybrid easy. Instead, they merely tell me that when I search for a car to click on “car examples” to see if there’s a “hybrid or flex fuel vehicle” available. Um. Yes. I did that before you launched the Green Travel Hub. And I can do it without you. They also highlight “green” car rental companies (Enterprise, National Car Rental, and Alamo) and their current environmental efforts. Having read about other companies' green steps lately, it’s unclear to me why these three companies get the green thumbs up, and others don’t.
What I really wish someone would do is let me enter my destination and get a list of local hybrid cars available and their prices. Please. Somebody do this. You’ll get my business (and my blog-post love) every time.
5. Pro: I’ll just give this one a pro to make up for my grumpiness above. GreenTravelHub links to Sustainable Travel International’s carbon offsetting program and encourages visitors to calculate their travel carbon load and purchase offsets accordingly. Until we get a sustainable version of biofuel for jets, carbon offsetting and limiting your flights is about all a globe-skipper can do.
6. Pro: They have a green travel blog and a green travel forum.
Con: The blog is updated infrequently and it looks like the forum hasn’t had any new posts since the moderator uploaded the first see conversations back in November.
Bottom line: E for Effort! I’m glad Rezhub is highlighting greener destinations, giving any amount of money back to green organizations, and encouraging its customers to offset their travels. Unfortunately, the Green Travel Hub hasn’t got the eco-travel toolbox its marketing promises -- yet. More stringent green ratings, more advanced search capabilities, and (please) some type of hybrid rental tool would greatly improve the site.
In the meantime, I’m going to stick with searching on my current favorite eco-hotel site, Environmentally Friendly Hotels. It has a great ratings system and the ability to search by eco-characteristic. You can’t book from this site, but it only takes one click to get to your selected hotel’s website and reserve your room directly. Easy.
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1. Pro: You get to choose which “green organization” receives a portion of the proceeds of every trip purchased through RezHub.com. (That's every trip -- not just "green" ones through the GreenTravelHub.) Vote here. The Conservation Fund is currently way ahead with 55 percent of the vote. Nice to give the power to the people, but...
Con: The vagueness concerns me. How much of their proceeds? And what will they do with the funds that come in while they are still deciding who gets the money? And will this seemingly nice gesture actually dissuade people from seeking out truly green options? “With us, all your travel is green,” they claim. This feels uncomfortably like green-washing to me.
2. Pro: The site’s “Green Score” system awards 3 points for harder actions (such as “support or use alternative energy”), 2 points for moderate actions (such as “participate in an energy conservation program”), and 1 point for simpler things like “uses re-usable service items.” It’s a smart way to give more weight to more important actions.
Con: Rezhub awards one green branch to any hotel that earns one to six points. (Two branches for seven to 12, three branches for 13 to 18, four branches for 19 to 24, and five branches for 25 to 30.) That means a hotel could put a ceramic coffee cup in your room instead of a Styrofoam one and get a green branch. Personally, I’d skip any low ranking green hotels and save your hard-earned for the four and five branch establishments.
3. Pro: Links to lists of green-ranked hotels in “popular destinations” in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, Mexico, and Australia.
Con: No advanced green search tool. You can check a box on Rezhub’s normal hotel search to only see “green” options. I’d like to be able to choose how many branches I require (or even which characteristics I find the most important), and have my tailored list served up for me.
4. Con: This one is just getting a con because I had such high hopes. I really wanted them to make renting a hybrid easy. Instead, they merely tell me that when I search for a car to click on “car examples” to see if there’s a “hybrid or flex fuel vehicle” available. Um. Yes. I did that before you launched the Green Travel Hub. And I can do it without you. They also highlight “green” car rental companies (Enterprise, National Car Rental, and Alamo) and their current environmental efforts. Having read about other companies' green steps lately, it’s unclear to me why these three companies get the green thumbs up, and others don’t.
What I really wish someone would do is let me enter my destination and get a list of local hybrid cars available and their prices. Please. Somebody do this. You’ll get my business (and my blog-post love) every time.
5. Pro: I’ll just give this one a pro to make up for my grumpiness above. GreenTravelHub links to Sustainable Travel International’s carbon offsetting program and encourages visitors to calculate their travel carbon load and purchase offsets accordingly. Until we get a sustainable version of biofuel for jets, carbon offsetting and limiting your flights is about all a globe-skipper can do.
6. Pro: They have a green travel blog and a green travel forum.
Con: The blog is updated infrequently and it looks like the forum hasn’t had any new posts since the moderator uploaded the first see conversations back in November.
Bottom line: E for Effort! I’m glad Rezhub is highlighting greener destinations, giving any amount of money back to green organizations, and encouraging its customers to offset their travels. Unfortunately, the Green Travel Hub hasn’t got the eco-travel toolbox its marketing promises -- yet. More stringent green ratings, more advanced search capabilities, and (please) some type of hybrid rental tool would greatly improve the site.
In the meantime, I’m going to stick with searching on my current favorite eco-hotel site, Environmentally Friendly Hotels. It has a great ratings system and the ability to search by eco-characteristic. You can’t book from this site, but it only takes one click to get to your selected hotel’s website and reserve your room directly. Easy.
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Hi Sarah,
My name is Melissa Evans and I am actually the Marketing Director for RezHub.com. I wanted to say thank you very much (from all of us) for taking the time to review our site! We really appreciate the comments and the feedback, and you pointed out some great areas for improvement. I also wanted to let you know that many of the things you mentioned we're already working on.
We are a brand new company (we just launched in September) so some of the things we planned to have in place already are taking longer than we expected. With a staff of 5 sometimes things don't always go as planned. But we will eventually get there. I also did want to address a few things and clear some things up for you (in order of your blog):
First, we actually donate 20% of our profits back each quarter to the customer chosen non-profit group. Thank you for pointing out the vagueness on the site! I have made the proper adjustments. We made the amount clear in blogs/press releases but somehow it escaped the actual site content.
Second, If a hotel only uses reusable dishware, we do not include them in the Green Score. They must at least have a sheets and towels program and participate in green programs. The reason we include hotels at this level is to show them that green is important to consumers and to also show them how much room they have for improvement (a 1/5 leaves a lot of room to grow). We also allow customers to view exactly which green programs the hotels participate in by clicking on the Green Score itself or the Green Amenities tab in the Hotel's Overview.
Third - I love your advanced Green Search tool idea,so you could only search for certain characteristics! That is definitely going on our list of things to do. Thank you for the idea! We did include a "Sort by Green" feature so that once you did a search for a particular city, you could choose "Sort by Green" and the hotels would then rearrange in order of their Green Score from High to Low.
Fourth, as far as the Hybrid Car Rentals go, this is in the works as we speak! We know exactly where you're coming from on this one and this has been a part of our plan from the beginning. Our new car rental grid should be launched within the next few weeks. The thing that took the most time was the fact that we had to program a way to highlight the green options right in the search results (hybrids, flex-fuels, and fuel efficient cars). This was not an easy task, but we are almost over the hump. Thanks for pointing out the urgency of this component of the site. I'm going to add some more information to our Green Car Rentals page to let people know that it's on it's way!
Finally, I do try to blog once a week, but the Forum is really for our customers to post in. Being so new, we don't have a huge customer base yet...but we are working on that as well. The forums are open for anyone to post in, and we do accept blogs from anyone as well (as long as they're on a green topic...in fact we'd love to include some of your blogs on the site). We're actually trying to stimulate more customer involvement there by offering extra entries in our Dream Green Giveaway for posting in the forums or blogs. But again, all of that does take time.
We actually just partnered with Environmentally Friendly Hotels as well. We love their site too, and their scoring system...and we'll be working with them to provide bookings with their hotels. That should be up and running within the next few weeks.
Thanks again for reviewing our site and for your excellent feedback. We need (and love) to hear it. I could not find your email address, so I apologize for posting this as a comment! Please feel free to contact me with any ideas or concerns in the future at mevans@rezhub.com.
Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Melissa and the RezHub.com Team
Posted by: Melissa Evans | May 30, 2008 at 08:48 AM