Green Hotel Indianapolis

Green Key Global is a international organization (US and Canada) that ranks hotels on 9 areas of sustainability (energy conservation, water conservation, solid waste management, hazardous waste management, indoor air quality, community outreach, building infrastructure, land use, and environmental management).  This encompasses all facets of our business from our hotel meetings to our hotel sleeping rooms.

A Four Green Keys designation is described by Green Key Global in this way:  “A hotel that has shown national industry leadership and commitment to protecting the environment through wide ranging policies and practices.  Mature programs that involve management, employees, guests, and the public have shown substantial and measurable results.

If travelling green is important to you, and you need hotel accommodations Indianapolis, then we invite you to stay with us or check out our environmental statement above. 
 

While perusing Twitter for interesting things around town, I came across this link.  Indianapolis was listed in the top 50 bike-friendly cities in the country! Although there are many trails in Indy to ride, the most well-known and probably the most popular is the Monon Trail.  It's beginning/end points are located in downtown, near 10th and Massachusetts, connects with the Monon Greenway at 96th Street and ends at 146th and Gray Road.

Mass Ave is a great place to start, too!  The avenue touts some great local restaurants, unique shopping, salons, theatres and music venues.  Our hotel is the closest of the downtown Indy hotels near Murat Centre, where touring bands, comedians and plays stop to entertain.  Another staple, and one of my personal favorites, The Rathskeller is on Mass Ave.  They have a great outdoor biergarten with concerts in the summer, a beautiful historic feel and a dizzying list of great German beers from which to choose!  Also, many of the weddings booked at The Rathskeller find accommodations for their guests at our Indianapolis wedding hotel.

The Monon is paved and has great scenery along the way.  From industrial warehouses to residential areas and a jaunt through Broad Ripple, the Monon has lots to see in its 15.5 miles.  The Monon begins just 1.5 walking/riding miles from the Hilton Garden Inn Indianapolis Downtown.  So you can start here, ride up, check out Broad Ripple and Carmel or start up there and come visit our hotel Indianapolis green hotel just off the greenway!

Now that we are on the other side of the process of making us the most newly renovated hotel in downtown Indy, I can share the green processes we used to lessen the impact to the environment. While we were able to incorporate several practices and introduce several products that were eco friendly, we also ran into several challenges that kept us from implementing everything we wanted to do with regard to this topic. So any suggestions of what we can do moving forward would be greatly appreciated.

Any time you do a renovation you have to balance what you need to do and what you want to do.   Here’s our scorecard:

1.        We were able to donate about 16,000 square feet of carpet and padding to another business.

2.       That which we weren’t able to donate, due to condition or lack of interest, we sent to Kruse Carpet Recycling Center. This amounted to about 51,000 square feet of carpet and padding

3.       We refurbished and reupholstered out common area seating on the second floor landings rather than replace the entire furniture piece as the frame was still in very good shape

4.       We were able to utilize Sherwin Williams Harmony line of zero VOC paint for all accent painting done in the main lobby and in the elevator landings on each floor, and in the restaurant. 

5.       Much of our fabric in our new guestroom and lobby seating was made with 100% recycled fibers.

6.       Any plastic or cardboard packaging that came with the new furniture was recycled this amounted to a tremendous amount of cardboard and the single stream recycling option from Waste Management made this a easy process and they were very helpful in working with us to remove the tremendous amount of cardboard that came with the packaging of our new guestroom chairs, lobby furniture, and restaurant seating. 

7.       We introduced dimmable CFL fluorescent bulbs into our restaurant area, and have experimented with LED lighting solutions in our lobby. To date the LED lighting solution does not deliver on adequate illumination in the lobby and we are told in about 3-4 months a satisfactory LED lighting will be available to replace a 250w flood lamp, which is our primary lighting source for the lobby. We are anxious to seeing this work.

I guess most important of all we were able to demonstrate to our management design company that several low cost/no cost sustainable solutions are available with a project like this and hopefully we can prod other hotels to take some of these same steps.

The staff at the Hilton Garden Inn Indianapolis Downtown has the caught the FEVER!  No, not a temperature, but for our Lady Fever.  We want to send out out congratulations for making it to our first WNBA Finals!  The ladies will be taking on the Mercury in game 3 at Conseco Fieldhouse on October 4, 2009. 

Maybe you can "catch the fever" and make it an overnight.   Looking for a hotel deal in Indianapolis?  Look no further.  We offer great Indianapolis hotel packages.  You can't beat out location... one of the closest hotels to Conseco Fieldhouse.   Go to work on Tuesday and let your co-workers be green with envy, that you were able to see the Fever win, and stay at a historic hotel of Indianapolis.  Start by checking into a room with a view of the Monument Circle and before the game have dinner in our American Grill, but don't stop there.  Have a victory drink in our lounge before calling it a night.  We'll see you in the morning for an amazing hot breakfast buffet.  Our staff is second to none and is proud to be one of the star hotels of Downtown Indianapolis. What are you waiting for?

Make your hotel accommodations now and start the celebration!