Pan Pacific Hotel Seattle is a luxury hotel located in the innovative South Lake Union neighborhood in Seattle, home to cutting edge technology companies and innovative life sciences organizations. In 2010, the hotel made a conscious decision to institute a comprehensive sustainability program called PanEarth, which honors the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.
The program began as a conscious effort to place sustainable and environmentally friendly practices as a top priority. Through the PanEarth program, Pan Pacific Hotel Seattle offers guests two options to offset their hotel stay and travel time. The sustainable travel option allows guests to mitigate the impact of their air and car travel by purchasing Climate Reserve Tonnes from a landfill project through our partner, Seattle-based OneEnergy Renewables. Transparency and legitimacy are important values of the PanEarth program. Having our offsets issued by a highly esteemed organization such as the Reserve supports these values. In addition, our program provides our guests the opportunity to follow the life cycle of their contribution, from verification through implementation.
The second option is the environmentally neutral hotel stay, which encourages conscientious environmental practices during a guest’s hotel visit. When guests financially match the electricity use of an average stay in one of our rooms, their contribution supports about 40 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean, wind energy going onto the US electricity grid. The wind energy for our hotel stay program is supported in the form of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which are sourced from facilities in both Washington State and North Dakota.
We chose to incorporate offsets into our PanEarth program because we are committed to being a hospitality leader in the area of Global Social Responsibility and believe that sustainable practices enhance guests’ and associates’ health as well as their experience with the property. In short, we believe makes business sense. It’s a win win for all of us.