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Tags: Green Hotels / Eco-Friendly Hotels / AAA Hotels / → All Tags

AAA's Guide to What's Green, Organic, and Eco All Over

The Nines Portland makes it easy to be green

When you're readying to book a hotel, you probably have a memorized list of criteria you mentally check off: location, star-rating, workout facilities, in-room amenities, and so on. Considering how hot—and we don't mean in the global warming sense—green hotels are these days, you might also question how "eco" your next hotel is. Are those low or no VOC paints on the wall? Are the toilets built to conserve water? Are the toiletries you might stuff in your suitcase 100 percent organic?

Investigating these questions while you're planning your trip is enough to drive even Al Gore crazy. To make the task less stressful, AAA, your roadside savior and glove compartment travel buddy, has launched an Eco-Friendly guide to the nation's hotels. Now all you have to do to locate green lodgings is look for an easy-to-spot "ECO" symbol in the AAA TourBook listings.

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Tags: Hotel Awards / AAA Hotels / Five Diamond Hotels / Luxury Hotels / California Hotels / Hotel News / → All Tags

AAA Gives Six New Hotels Five Diamond Status

The view from the Montage Laguna Beach

UPDATE: See the full list here.

AAA has just released their new list of 2009 Five Diamond Hotels and it turns out California is a pretty nice place for hotels. Of the six new hotels to gain Five Diamond status, three of them are in Southern California.

· The Beverly Hills Hotel: Our favorite hotel for celeb-spotting.
· The Montage Laguna Beach: They of the best crabcakes.
· Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village: The place to recuperate from your plastic surgery.

There's no complete listing on either the AAA website or their Twitter page but USA Today reported that the other three new Five Diamonds are The Ritz-Carlton, Palm Beach, InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta, and Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis.

Have you stayed at one of these Five Diamond hotels recently? Think they deserve the award? Let us know in comments below.

[Photo: ShaoloPaolo]