Hospitality Industry: IA Heartland hotels

Heartland hotels ban smoking from all premises
The Waterloo-based company says it is following a U.S. trend.

June 15, 2006
By BONNIE HARRIS
REGISTER BUSINESS WRITER

Heartland Inns of America announced Wednesday that it will ban smoking from all guest rooms and public areas at each of its 19 properties in Iowa and Wisconsin, reflecting a trend in the hotel industry.

An increase in guest requests for nonsmoking rooms over the years helped persuade Heartland managers to make the change, which takes effect immediately.

“We’ve had less and less smoking rooms at our properties in recent years,” said Kimberly Kalkhoff, a spokeswoman for the Waterloo-based company. “We just kept running out of nonsmoking rooms and finally decided to step up and do this right.”

Kalkhoff said Heartland is the first moderately priced hotel chain of its size to implement a 100 percent smoke-free policy. But the move falls in line with a national trend to eliminate secondhand smoke for guests and employees, industry experts said.

In January, all 77 Westin Hotel & Resort properties went 100 percent smoke-free, making it the first upscale hotel brand to do so.

In March, all three of Disneyland’s hotels in California adopted the policy.

Craig Walter, executive vice president of the Iowa Lodging Association, said more hotels around the state are going smoke-free, although the majority still designate between 10 percent and 20 percent of their rooms as “smoking rooms.”

“But the trend now is to go the opposite way,” said Walter, noting that the Holiday Inn Express in Cedar Rapids was the first in Iowa to go entirely smoke-free earlier this year. “It’s one of those things where some companies are watching to see what happens when others make the switch. Westin really set the tone for many, I think.”

The American Cancer Society and other groups praised Heartland’s new policy Wednesday.

“It’s pretty phenomenal that hotels are starting to advertise themselves rather proudly as being completely smoke-free,” said Frieda Glantz, a project manager for Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, a nonprofit group based in Berkeley, Calif. “They realize it’s the right thing to do for the health of their employees but also for the health of their business.”

Glantz said 16 states have a smoke-free law in place.

A smokers-rights group called Heartland’s move a “big mistake.” Garnet Dawn, the spokeswoman for the Smokers Club, said smokers comprise 20 percent to 30 percent of the U.S. population. “That’s an awfully big group to be excluding from your business,” she said.
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