The guy who runs Cigar Envy (a cigar blog) has written some thoughts on the Westin Hotels & Resorts decision to institute a smoking ban. It is a really good read and he has some good points in it. I reccomend giving it a read when you have a chance.
Greater than 92% of the customers request non-smoking rooms. Seems like just good business sense to me.
I'm willing to bet a good share of that 92% are actually smokers, but they themselves don't particularly enjoy sleeping in the stale smokey rooms that you find in hotels.
When I'm home, I smoke in particular areas so that the smell doesn't permeate my sleeping area or my clothing. I hate being in a hotel room where it smells like stale smoke and where I just know after a few hours in there, I and all my clothes will be smelling of the same rancid odor.
I always go for a non-smoking room. Then, I go out for a walk or sit on the patio and smoke my cigar. My experience has been that the hotels that have smoking rooms end up with the pillows smelling from the smoke maybe by having been in a smoking room at one time. My favorite Best Western has a really nice dining room with an alcove with a really good air cleaning system and makes a great place to sit and have a cigar without bothering anyone else. If you are passing through Wisconsin, it is the Arrowhead Best Western in Black River Falls. You can see it from highway 94.
I'm suspicious of the 92% figure, since another article I read said that they got their statistics from a "Smoke Free Survey." If that's what they called it, then I wonder how many smokers just chucked it without filling it out.
Plus, you can usually make statistics say anything you want them to say. You know the old saying about "Liars, Damned Liars, and Statisticians."
The thing I notice is that more and more of these bans are going through because smokers are just sitting back and not doing anything to stop it.
I hate to admit it but, since I don't smoke cigars in my hotel rooms, I always ask for a non-smoking room on the assumption that I can smoke in the bars, restaurants, lounges, etc. in that hotel. The Little Woman probably wouldn’t vacation with me otherwise.
Truth is, the few smoking rooms I've had were dirtier and smellier than non-smoking rooms. (Book a smoking and non-smoking room in Atlantic City and compare...)
I'll be boycotting Starwood hotels on principle but the truth is either cigarette smokers (who mostly book these rooms) are scuzzier, or the hotels don't care for the rooms as well, possibly because the former is true.
Looking at this as a marketer, I doubt Starwood will suffer any consequences from this move. Sure, cigar smokers are affluent but for the most part, cigarette smokers aren’t. Our combined clout isn’t enough to make a difference in this case. (Besides, even cigarette smokers don’t want to be lumped in with us – after all, how many times have you been at a bar and had a cigarette smoker ask you to ‘put that stinky thing out’?!?!)
Starwood probably will receive a ton of free publicity. Plus, militant non-smokers may even look to their properties first as a show of solidarity. That’s the trap…the more we speak up, the more it steels the resolve of the anti-smoking nazis.
I wish I had some answers, but aside from booking smoking rooms everywhere we go, I don’t see any recourse. We’re the scum of the earth. We give little babies lung cancer just by walking by with a cigar. In New Jersey, apparently we can’t even drive while smoking without crashing – otherwise, they wouldn’t want to ban smoking in cars, too.
I think the only thing we can do is to continue to support publications like CA, plus restaurants, bars and hotels don’t merely tolerate us, but cater to us.
If they’re not with us, they’re against us. Simple as that.
Originally posted by THEMONK: Nonsmoking room here. Now if they had a cigar room..........I'd take it. Just think big tv, nice leather seats and wet bar...
Well, yeah, then I'd reconsider my nonsmoking room preference...
I'm a maintenance engineer for Best Western in Vermont. We are not a standard hotel. We have 7 buildings with 16 rooms in each building (112 rooms total) We have 3 buildings with 8 smoking rooms in each. The rest of the property is non smoking. For my property, the smoking rooms are always full, monday thru thursday. Corperate and construction type guest, fill the smoking rooms up. Friday thru sunday with leisure guests, we can't give the smoking rooms away. If we were to loose the smoking rooms, we would lose the bulk of our corperate and construction buisness. That would kill us, we really depend on the smokers. We offer suites with full kitchens, dinning rooms , and living rooms. 12 of our smoking rooms are these suites. We rely on extended stay buisness. Construction crews, corperate people doimg buisness or moving into the area, are our bread and butter. I hope Best Western doesn't ban smoking.
France and chicken, Somehow they just go together. (Subway)
Success...When preperation meets opportunity
Posts: 134 | Location: Vermont | Registered: August 21, 2005
I think the problem is that too many new-age types are making these kinds of decisions at the corporate level. If you haven't read the rest of that article at http://CigarEnvy.com, you missed some choice bits.
The woman executive from Westin talks about her goal of restoring the bodies, minds and souls of their guests and of a smoker "violating" the purity of the room by smoking in it. Wow, does it sound like she needs some couch time--psychologist couch time, I mean.
There's another Westin manager quoted in the article that sounds arrogant as hell, saying if smokers aren't happy and don't want to stay with Westin on their terms, then they'll be replaced by somebody who appreciates a smoke-free room. The company just doesn't come off well in what they're quoted as saying.
Plus, in the last section about discrimination, if you fill in the blanks in that quotation from Westin with "gays" or "blacks" or "hispanics" of "Jews" instead of "smokers" you won't believe how bad it sounds. They'd have lawsuits out the yoohoo if that had been said about any other group. Yet we smokers just sit back and just take it.
Maybe we need to have CA form a Cigar Smokers Anti-Defamation League or something. You'd think we'd at least have an effective, well-funded PAC or Lobby working to head this stuff off. Another five years of this and they'll make tobacco completely illegal.
The next trend will be with Car Rental Companies. I had to rent a car a few weeks ago, and most of the major companies would only allow smoking in a rented car IF you picked it up and dropped it off at an airport location. All downtown & city locations had smoke free automobiles only.
Posts: 1868 | Location: San Francisco, CA, USA | Registered: August 20, 2003
Originally posted by willbeck: Plus, in the last section about discrimination, if you fill in the blanks in that quotation from Westin with "gays" or "blacks" or "hispanics" of "Jews" instead of "smokers" you won't believe how bad it sounds.
That's absurd. There is no logic for making this connection with race.
Originally posted by cigarmanron: Will it apply to all the the Starwood properties?
If so, that would include: -Westin -Sheraton -W Hotels.
Officially, it is only going to be Westin, but I read in another article that they're "in talks" with the other hotels in the chain to make all Starwood smoke-free (that includes Le Meridien and some others plus Sheraton and W).
Only in North America though. They aren't planning on doing it at Asian and European properties.
Originally posted by willbeck: Plus, in the last section about discrimination, if you fill in the blanks in that quotation from Westin with "gays" or "blacks" or "hispanics" of "Jews" instead of "smokers" you won't believe how bad it sounds.
That's absurd. There is no logic for making this connection with race.
I think you missed the point Sobek. He wasn't making a connection with race. He was making a connection with minority groups in general. The point is if you subsitute any other minority group in the blanks of that statement and it becomes offensive, but it's gotten to the point where the anti-smoking faction wants everyone to believe it is offensive to be a smoker. Smokers don't make any noise when they are excluded or discriminated against because of this. But I don't think anyone is trying to compare the plight of the smoker to that of blacks, or of those other groups he mentioned.
-Matt Matt's Cigar Journal "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke." -Rudyard Kipling
That's absurd. There is no logic for making this connection with race.
I think that the logic is "minority rights" and I don't think it is absurd at all.
Who draws the line on what is acceptable, what is offensive to others, and what can be banned.
Being black in the first half of the 20th century prevented you from getting a room at a whole lot of hotels. I'm sure there were a lot of managers back then who thought that a black person staying in one of their hotel rooms would "violate" the purity of the room and cause all kinds of extra cleaning problems.
But, if you don't like "race" being mentioned, then how about some other minority distinction like "overly obese people," or "AIDS sufferers," or "hard liquor drinkers," or "people in wheelchairs."
Anti-smoking crusaders have gone from saying that all they wanted was no smoking on air flights and no-smoking sections in restaurants to banning smoking in entire cities inside to banning smoking within 25 feet of a door or window outside. There are people trying to pass bills to make it illegal to smoke in private cars and in private homes.
How soon before you have to provide a medical certificate, proof of being on the Patch, and your clothes packed in bags fresh from the Dry Cleaners before they'll let you check into a hotel? How soon before smoking is outlawed completely? I read an article a couple of weeks ago where some Australian official said that tobacco in all forms would be outlawed in that country within 20 years according to plan.
The only thing that is absurd is that so many of us are watching this happen step by step and doing nothing to fight it. Prohibition, here we go again.
I think you missed the point Sobek. He wasn't making a connection with race. He was making a connection with minority groups in general. The point is if you subsitute any other minority group in the blanks of that statement and it becomes offensive, but it's gotten to the point where the anti-smoking faction wants everyone to believe it is offensive to be a smoker. Smokers don't make any noise when they are excluded or discriminated against because of this. But I don't think anyone is trying to compare the plight of the smoker to that of blacks, or of those other groups he mentioned.
Exactly. Fill in ANY other minority in those blanks and the statement is way too offensive to have been made today. You could only say that kind of thing about smokers and get away with it.
However, I do think that there is a similarity with the attitude toward smokers today and the attitude toward blacks before the Civil Rights movement---in both cases, it was socially acceptable to be prejudiced against the group and just "the way things were."
On a different but related subject, there is a new article up quoting a London editorial about the junk science of second-hand smoke with a lot of interesting information on actual scientific studies.
That's absurd. There is no logic for making this connection with race.
I think that the logic is "minority rights" and I don't think it is absurd at all.
Who draws the line on what is acceptable, what is offensive to others, and what can be banned.
Being black in the first half of the 20th century prevented you from getting a room at a whole lot of hotels. I'm sure there were a lot of managers back then who thought that a black person staying in one of their hotel rooms would "violate" the purity of the room and cause all kinds of extra cleaning problems.
But, if you don't like "race" being mentioned, then how about some other minority distinction like "overly obese people," or "AIDS sufferers," or "hard liquor drinkers," or "people in wheelchairs."
Anti-smoking crusaders have gone from saying that all they wanted was no smoking on air flights and no-smoking sections in restaurants to banning smoking in entire cities inside to banning smoking within 25 feet of a door or window outside. There are people trying to pass bills to make it illegal to smoke in private cars and in private homes.
How soon before you have to provide a medical certificate, proof of being on the Patch, and your clothes packed in bags fresh from the Dry Cleaners before they'll let you check into a hotel? How soon before smoking is outlawed completely? I read an article a couple of weeks ago where some Australian official said that tobacco in all forms would be outlawed in that country within 20 years according to plan.
The only thing that is absurd is that so many of us are watching this happen step by step and doing nothing to fight it. Prohibition, here we go again.
That is a long defense of an irrelevant point.
Race and diseases you can not instantly stop when you step foot in a hotel lobby.
quote:
I'm sure there were a lot of managers back then who thought that a black person staying in one of their hotel rooms would "violate" the purity of the room and cause all kinds of extra cleaning problems.
That would be a matter of biased opinion. Smoke soiling a room is not a matter of opinion. It is tangible fact. Frankly I find your attempt to link racism to this issue, even as an seemingly harmless analogy, is in poor taste.
quote:
But, if you don't like "race" being mentioned, then how about some other minority distinction like "overly obese people," or "AIDS sufferers," or "hard liquor drinkers," or "people in wheelchairs."
Those are all very serious, yet equally irrelevant examples. Listing such conditions in the same topic is a cheezy way to evoke sympathy. You might as well post some pics of puppies and kittens to add to your argument.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: sobek,
