Budget hotels are big business

In its first partnership with a major budget hotel chain in Asia, GE Lighting is collaborating with Tune Hotels to jointly explore and implement green solutions across its portfolio of hotels. To date, 2876 light points have been replaced with GE’s energy-efficient and eco-friendly LED lights across Tune Hotels in Malaysia. With the new lighting solutions for both exterior and interior environments, the hotels stand out with high-quality illumination while enjoying energy savings and lower maintenance costs.

Tune Hotels is a leading ‘limited service’ hotel chain. It has a current portfolio of 26 operational hotels across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, The Philippines and the United Kingdom with an ambitious development pipeline in the works. GE’s collaboration with Tune Hotels is its first such partnership with a major budget hotel chain in Asia and beyond.

Mark Lankester, CEO of Tune Hotels, commented: “For Tune Hotels, it is very important for us to operate efficiently and be eco-friendly as any savings will directly benefit our customers. We needed a global partner that understands our needs and has the scale to support us in all the countries that we want to go into. GE was a perfect match. As we embark on an aggressive expansion plan to open 30 new hotels from 2012 across Asia and the United Kingdom, we look forward to having GE support our lighting needs. In Malaysia, we aim to be the first branded budget hotel chain in Asia to be certified to the standards of the country’s Green Building Index.”

Under the initial phase of the partnership, GE Lighting has, to date, implemented its energy-efficient solutions in Malaysia. Some 2876 light points for both exterior and interior environments have been replaced at Tune Hotels Ipoh and Tune Hotels Kuala Lumpur. The products specified include LED battens and Tetra Signage System comprising the Tetra miniMAX.

Mr O Swee Aun, Country Manager of GE Lighting Malaysia, elaborated: “It is exciting to work with a client like Tune Hotels who share our vision and commitment towards green technology. In today’s competitive business arena, adopting an energy-efficient and eco-friendly approach to lighting solutions will benefit our clients and their customers in the long term. While providing good quality illumination to meet our clients’ needs, we also look forward to offering them greater savings and, at the same time, conserving natural resources. Given GE’s global presence and the breadth and depth of our range of products and technical expertise, we are a premier one-stop lighting solutions provider for all types of environments.”

Creating ‘home away from home’ ambience for the hotel interiors

The GE team aimed to create a comfortable and welcoming interior that would invite guests to relax and enjoy their stay at Tune Hotels, their ‘home away from home’.

For the hotels, the LED battens were installed at the lift lobby, corridor, toilet, room and bed pelmet.

The LED battens were used as the main ambient lighting. They were able to achieve the luminance level as required by the customer while providing greater energy savings and a more uniform lighting distribution effect as compared to conventional fluorescent lights used previously.

The GE LED batten, with its simple appearance and compact structure, brings customers new experience of soft LED lighting. It offers a long lifetime of 45,000 hours, which contributes to greatly reduced maintenance and replacement costs. With the special optical design, the LED batten provides more comfortable and uniform lighting effects for customers. In addition, the integrated design and three-cove light bracket options make it more convenient for installation. LED battens can be used in a wide range of general lighting applications, such as supermarkets, underground garage, home and display occasions.

Lighting for distinctive urban landmarks

Each Tune Hotel tends to be the distinctive landmark of the city that it is in. To add a brilliant glow to the exterior facade and signage, the GE team specified the Tetra Signage system that utilises high-luminance, energy-efficiency LED that offers a consistent colour tone across the signage, enabling the true representation of the image of Tune Hotel. The high reliability of the Tetra Signage system also significantly reduces the maintenance cost of signage, which tends to be at hard-to-reach areas.

The Tetra system provides for miniature channel letter lighting for logo letters and is also suitable for cove lighting, accent or border lighting for commercial buildings. The OptiLens maximises the area of light coverage to produce uniformity. It comes with easy mounting and an overmoulded design which protects the components from moisture. Users have a choice of a full range of colours including white, warm white, red, blue and green.

Reaping returns and reducing environmental impact

With GE Lighting’s new lighting solutions, Tune Hotels will enjoy estimated savings of 30-40% in terms of energy and maintenance costs. This translates to a payback period of approximately 1.6 years. From an environmental protection perspective, the energy savings is equivalent to eliminating nearly 375,000 kg of carbon dioxide car emissions per year, or creating 102.3 acres of new trees.