Pete Stidman

BOSTON COURANT

Guests are asking for it, new trade magazines are dedicated to it, and hoteliers in the Back Bay are watching it improve their bottom line. It is green tourism, and it no longer requires a rainforest visit.

“It's all happening very quickly,” said Dan Ruben of Boston Green Tourism (BGT), a conservation advocacy group. “Several years ago not many people thought about having green hotels. Now hotels are putting an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm and energy into this.”

One measure of a green hotel is energy efficiency. A year ago, only three hotels in Massachusetts carried the EPA Energy Star rating, which designates buildings that are in the upper 25 percentile of the most efficient buildings nationwide. Today 16 in the state carry the award, with the Jurys Boston Hotel at Stuart and Berkeley Streets recently passing the bar.

“We're quite proud of it,” said Jurys general manager Stephen Johnston. “We have a plaque just inside the front door.”

For Jurys Doyle Hotels, a chain with dozens of luxury hotels in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the energy-saving initiative was born in the Boston location. The hotel opened three years ago in the old Boston Police Headquarters building. The new boilers and other equipment installed during construction made achieving an Energy Star rating a natural step.

Johnston said the hotel spent only about $60,000 on new compact fluorescent bulbs, a greywater recycling unit to collect condensation from their cooling units, and a cardboard compactor to help recycling efforts.

According to the hotel's chief engineer David Draband, rebates from local utilities like NStar made the changeover less costly. NStar offered $4 per bulb for the lighting changeout.

“Most of these programs have a very short return on investment period: three years or less, sometimes two years,” said Draband. The next step for Jurys might be guest room occupancy sensors that turn down air conditioning and lighting when guests are out.

Governor Deval Patrick announced a proposal on June 25 that would require NStar and National Grid to pay for more energy conservation efforts, and allow the two companies to charge more per unit of power sold to offset their costs. Meanwhile, James Hunt, chief of Environmental and Energy Services, said the Menino administration is working to create a $300 to $500 million energy efficiency fund based on the Cambridge Energy Alliance's fund that would provide low or no interest loans to property owners for conservation measures. The loans would be repaid with the savings on utility bills.

The leader of urban green hotels in the Back Bay and perhaps the world is The Lenox Hotel on Boylston Street. Tedd Saunders, part of the third generation of the Saunders family to own the hotel, convinced his family to invest in green options back in 1989, well before Inconvenient Truth woke up the country to the impending global warming crisis.

“Rather than think about the business from a quarterly perspective, we think about the long-term and the legacy we will leave,” Saunders said. “It doesn't take much to trim the fat and leave the fillet for our guests.”

With over 100 eco-initiatives under the hotel's belt, it is in the 87th percentile of energy efficiency according to its Energy Star rating, a difficult task for a historic hotel. The Lenox buys renewable power, such as wind-generated energy, to offset 100 percent of its electricity. It is also the only urban hotel named in Condé Nast Traveler's green list, which cites the green hotel and resort leaders across the world.

A guest might sit on a chair upholstered with recycled soda bottles, eat a locally grown organic meal or drink water bottled in a plant that uses geothermal power. Now, Saunders is investigating the possibility of filtering all the air that comes into the hotel in order to make it the cleanest in the industry.

“We're not a carbon neutral hotel but it's as close as any urban hotel I know of to [it],” Saunders said.

Other hotels are scrambling to catch up. Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel is preparing to switch to LED lighting and offers green events. The Four Seasons is exploring co-generation, a way to combine heating and electricity generation. And the Boston Youth Hostel in the Fenway is rumored to be looking for a new location on which to build the greenest hostel in the country.

“That's very exciting, to see Boston Green Tourism take hold,” Saunders said. “Soon Boston may be recognized as a leading green destination among any city in the country, perhaps the world.”

For a list of green hotels, see bostongreentourism.org.