The Marriott hotel chain will no longer allow smoking in any of its guest rooms, according to this report. Interestingly, the decision appears to have been motivated by Marriott's concern for the bottom line.
Two decades ago, about half the company's rooms were set aside for smokers, but demand has steadily dropped, with only 5 percent of customers now requesting smoking rooms. At the same time, complaints about cigarette odor have increased, and company officials have struggled to address the issue.
Marriott, which will enforce its ban by charging violators $200 to $300, follows that of the Westin Hotels & Resorts chain, which late last year announced it was making all 77 of its properties smoke-free. Since then, business has grown stronger, said Sue Brush, a senior vice president with Westin, which is owned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc.
An interesting question is how this decision will affect activist campaigns to impose local smoking bans in various parts of the country. Smoking ban advocates will cite Marriott's decision as evidence that banning smoking is not bad for business. Yet in my opinion this decision is evidence that service companies are respnsive to changes in consumer preferences and demands. Marriott's decision was driven by market pressures, specifically by a recognition that it was more costly to try and accomodate both smokers and non-smokers than to go smoke-free. Similalrly, many restaurants and bars have banned or limited smoking because they would prefer to attract non-smoking patrons. The point is that if a substantial percentage of consumers want smoke-free accomodations, enough businesses should respond to satisfy that preference. And, if the rate of change is too slow for some, I would recommend than smoking-ban proponents devote their resources to pressuring firms to adopt smoking limitations, instead of lobbying for legislative smoking bans than deny a singificant portion of people (the 20 percent or so of Americans who still smoke) the opportunity to seek accomodations that meet their preferences. I quit smoking cigarettes years ago, and enjoy smoke-free restaurants, but I see no need to impose my preferences on others through legislative fiat.
Related Posts (on one page):
- More on Smoking Bans:
- Marriott Goes Smoke-Free:
Do you have evidence to support the claim that many bars and restaurants banned smoking alltogether before legislatively-imposed bans were in place. That may be true somewhere, but I don't think that's remotely true in New York.
Also, I have to wonder how much the existence of legislatively-imposed bans influenced customer preferences/consciousness, which in turn made it economically rational for businesses to impose their own bans.
Recall that McDonald's banned smoking in all it's company-owned (as opposed to franchisee owned) restaurants back in the early 1990s. That move was followed by several other fast food chains doing the same within a few years.
I guarantee you that a quick survey of hotel availability will show that non-smoking room rental rates overwhelm smoking room rental rates, and I can tell you from personal experience looking for a room to break up a long trip, that hotel after hotel had only smoking rooms available, and often had many.
Hence, this is not about "imposing preferences." Marriott's tardy effort notwithstanding, this is about a mammoth market failure.
Fine, but aren't all health, safety and zoning regulations founded on exactly that, not to mention taxes on alcohol and banning of drugs and mis-education of children Yes, let's kill off the nanny state. I was happy during the old regime, when I just walked up to smokers polluting my air and offered to help them put out their cigarettes. And if the nanny state has any validity, it is in protecting children confined in small spaces with smoking parents!
But I do think laws banning smoking have had a big consciousness-raising effect on consumers. I didn't realize just how offensive smoke was until after New York banned smoking in public places because there weren't any nonsmoking bars available against which to compare. I was ambivalent about smoking bans before even though I've never been a smoker myself. But now, as both a consumer and voter, I personally am much more supportive of keeping other people's smoke out of the public environment.
My feeling is that as long as you know their smoking policy in advance, they should be able to have whatever policy they want. It's your choice to go inside, and there are plenty of smoke-free alternatives out there. Where there's market demand, entrepreneurs rush in to fill it.
If a Republican is worried about the "Nanny State"...better to ask their Republican Senator why he voted for the IMBRA law which makes it a privilege and not a right for Americans to even say "hello" to foreigners. The IMBRA law, written by the nanny state Democrats to "protect" non-existent "mail order brides" is under restraining order by a federal judge in Georgia. But a federal judge in Ohio has stated his feelings that "the Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental liberty interest in Americans meeting foreigners for relationships".
In the MSM and also on the Blogosphere...weak and pathetic American metrosexuals (yes that means most right wing bloggers as well) decide what gets discussed and what doesn't.
This smoking issue is old hat and nothing compared to the huge loss of rights we all face as a radical feminist organization, the Tahirih Justice Center for Womyn, works with the fraudulent Lifetime Television for Womyn to rabidly fight in the courts (in place of the government) to make sure the courts do not overturn IMBRA.
This law would put James Bond in jail for chatting up the foreign Bond girls.
No it's not. You'd have to be in a bar 200 hours to inhale the amount of smoke a smoker gets by smoking one cigarette. Numerous peer reviewed studies have found no or negligible effect from secondhand smoke.
And employment at bars in voluntary. You can quit if you don't like the working conditions.
May I humbly suggest that the reasons bars have not gone "no smoking" due to customer demand. Importantly, a there are a number of "I only smoke when I drink" folk out there who like a smoke in the bar.
We have an interesting situation in St. Louis, where we have many small municipal suburbs. Here, bar owners have argued that the ban must be county wide, so consumers don't vote with their feet and drive to the next town. I, for one, would like to see a municipal ban, just to see if it really would deter patrons.
Only a slight minority of my friends smoke. All of my friends drink. All of my friends who don't smoke would prefer to have a beer in a bar with no smoke (mostly for aesthetic reasons). Despite this, I can think of only _1_ bar here in town that has gone smoke-free (and we all like that bar and go there for just that reason, despite being otherwise a bar we'd probably not visit very often).
Likewise, as I noted, the demand for non-smoking rooms overwhelms the supply, and yet hotels are very slow to change (as will be apparent if you try to find non-smoking hotel room any time after sunset during the summer).
There are surely endless examples of market failures like this, both related to smoking and otherwise. While I am big fan of microeconomics and law and economics, the true meat of the matter has to be in analyzing imperfect markets, which are really the only markets there are.
I suspect at the very least this deciscion does not apply to the japanese areas (many hotels have them I assume Marriott does as well) in Mariott hotels.
Also I find it weird that this could be motivated by concern for the bottom line. The absolute percent of smokers staying in Mariott hotels is really irrelevant. What matters is the existance of a stable percentage of smokers amoung the clientel at any particular hotel. So long as your hotel never has more than 95% of it's capacity filled by individuals who have a significant preference for a non-smoking room then it is in your interest to retain 5% of your rooms for smokers.
Moreover, it is often in the economic interest of places like hotels or restaurants to at least make things palatable for minorities. Just as many meat oriented restaurants offer vegetarian options so people with a vegetarian friends will still consider the option it seems foolish to totally ban smoking when this likely means some groups with many non-smokers won't stay at the Mariott. I mean if just one executive on a buisness trip smokes he might choose a different hotel for everyone.
Perhaps the economic justification is based on insurance premiums, i.e., no smokers means lower fire insurance rates. Or perhaps this is just a PR ploy and they still intend to let people smoke under the table.
I suspect by banning smoking entierly rather than limiting it to a small number of dedicated rooms they will actually increase the problems with smoking smell rather than decrease them. After all you can never prove after the fact that someone smoked and people tend to regard their hotel rooms like little islands of home where other people don't get to tell them what to do. I don't smoke and if I choose a non-smoking room I would try to abide by the policy but if a hotel gave me no choice and I wanted to have a girl over who smoked I wouldn't hesitate to violate it.
If someone smokes in a room, the smell lingers for a good long time, especially if that room doesn't have windows that open. The last time I stayed in a hotel, there was a friendly little card reminding us that this was a non-smoking room, and informing us that if we chose to disregard this rule, that a $300 "cleaning fee" would be charged to our credit card. That alone should be sufficient disincentive for most people. Maybe you'll be able to air out the room well enough that no one will notice, but that's an expensive gamble.
As to the first point, link to the "200 hours" claim? More generally, I assume you've seen the new government reports on the harms of second-hand smoking.
As to the second point, do you therefore oppose all worker health and safety rules?
I assume you've seen the report, and not just the press comments which didn't even get the abstract right?
Anyone who has ever been trapped on a plane or bus between two inconsiderate fat people taking up 1.5 seats apiece will rejoice at the prospect of banning fat. Anyone who has ever had to wait for some overweight person to waddle and squeeze through an ordinary door will be delighted by relief from the inconvenience. Anyone who has suffered trepidation in an elevator overloaded by overweight people will understand the safety reasons to ban fat.
The bottom line is that overweight people engage in conduct that would be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable if it involved anything other than body fat. If anyone carried all that fat around in buckets instead of under their skin they would be arrested for creating a public health nuisance. If anyone boarded an airplane with luggage the size of some passengers' posteriors, they'd be told to check it with the non-carryon luggage.
I regret that slender people might responded by trashing private property rights, but I shed not a tear for the overweight people themselves. They have a choice whether to be overweight. They should be denied any public space or accomodation as long as they make that choice.
After that, government should ban mouth-breathers, fingernail chewers and cellphone talkers. These nanny crusades needn't stop until there are exactly two people outside prison, because neither can gain a majority vote to persecute an "offensive" minority.
That would translate to about 250 hours for the equivilent of one cigarette, or to put it another way, working a 10 hour shift in a smoke filled bar 7 days a week for a year, with no vacation time would equal smoking about 3/4s of a pack in that year.
I heard too, that the surgeon general came out with some sort of statement, but I haven't read the report and doubt that the MSM quoted it or him accurately.
I haven't read the report itself (work has to get done sometime), but I'd hazard that the Surgeon General does not take Mark H.'s position.
But seriously, I don't have a position, yet. I tend to think that the report I referenced (and others I've read over the years) is more substantial than the politicized position of our government, but I'll wait and see how the report gets sliced and diced by the opposition before acknowledging defeat or reveling in victory.
It would be nice, though, if Bush smoked, so this study could be quashed along with the global warming stuff that he suppresses to help his oil buddies -- I know he suppresses those reports because some guy that works for him tells me so every few months on 60 Minutes :-)
Call me overly humble ( You're overly humble! ed. ) but I actually think that hotel owners know more about running hotels and bar owners know more about running bars than I do (or you do). If you want a plausible reason why it's a good for businesses to force them to do what they can do without being forced any day, you have to come up with a reason why they would want to do it if all the other like businesses did it as well, but not if they do it alone.
I know. I just came back from my dad's who smokes and now all my clothes smell horrible. This is exactly why the smoking ban is a bad idea.
Non-smokers should be able to stay in rooms that don't stink of smoke (and if you want to smoke you have to stay in such a room). If you ban smoking entierly smokers will just smoke in the non-smoking rooms and you won't be able to prove they did. If you let them smoke only in the smokers rooms they will volountarily self-segragate.
Not too dumb a business strategy, if you ask me.