Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009

Tourism group adopts environmental focus

Stephen Greene - who took the helm at the Myrtle Beach Area Hospitality Association last month - will continue to promote "green" programs for area hotels and plans to survey members on what issues the group should focus on.

Greene, a former vice president of communication with the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, replaced Pauline Levesque as the association's president and CEO. She resigned in July after four years to take a job as the chief marketing officer at her son's company, ITS, a managed services provider.

First up for Greene is the candidates forum. The group will have a forum for Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach mayoral and City Council candidates at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday at Pine Lakes Country Club in Myrtle Beach.

After a few weeks on the job, Greene sat down to answer some questions about his plans for the association.

What's first on your agenda?

We had a number of events that were already in the works. Obviously, we have the candidates forum, which is [this] Wednesday. This year is a bit different, just because of the large number of candidates. There are 25 candidates. We're going to spend a little time, one-on-one, talking about, whether they're elected or re-elected, kind of the industry issues that are facing us and asking for their support and understanding looking toward those issues and then spend a lot of one-on-one time talking to industry leaders, and the candidates, talking about their issues, our issues and each of our viewpoints. Looking at that, we have some new members' events that we have in November, and we're doing a social in December where we're going to talk a lot about the hospitality partnership and its role and the role of our organization and the role of the chamber. We're going to bring in the state hospitality association and kind of reflect on '09 and looking forward to [2010] and really letting our members know where we are.

Give us an update on the Green-Clean-Safe hotel certification program that started in July.

We've had a few hotels go through the complete training. We're in the process of looking at whether the grants through the Waccamaw Council of Governments are still there to continue the program. We're looking, between that program being launched, there's also a new program through the State Hospitality Association of South Carolina, along with [the Department of Health and Environmental Control] , that they're unveiling, that's kind of different from the other program, so it's a perfect time for us to look at the success of this program and a number of hotels went through it, how has it worked for them, how has it worked for their staffing needs. [The state] program is going to start at the end of this month. We kind of have both of those plans looking toward the future. We really do see it as a really positive step. We want to see as many properties and facilities potentially look at this green route. ... A lot of people are looking for that.

What's the major difference between the state program and the one that's already in place?

The state program, it has a self-regulatory component to it, meaning you potentially don't have as much coursework as before. One of the things we're looking at in this program is when you have to take out that many resources from your property and put them through the training, there's obviously costs with that, along with the costs to make the cost adjustments to the property. ... This one is much more of a green facilitator, really looking at the chemicals you use, how you do things and what impact are you actually having on the footprint of the community based on those factors. It's really on the green side of it. The Green-Clean-Safe kind [of] took three components and rolled them into one certification.

How many hotels have been through the Green-Clean-Safe certification?

I think it's less than a dozen that have completed it.

Is there anything long-term that you're working on?

Right now, we're just looking at every project. We have golf tournaments, we have trio dinners. ... We're actively trying to find benefits that could potentially help the voice of the association and also help benefit the community as a whole. We have a lot of things to go over and assess where we are, but we'll probably, in the next three months, really spend that time to figure out what those goals are and have some announcements when we have the opportunity.