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Regardless of how you feel about electric vehicles, the fact is that more and more are being purchased every day and the demand on the charging infrastructure is, in some areas, growing considerably quicker than the infrastructure itself, and that makes today’s announcement from IHG good news for a lot of travelers.
IHG partners with EnviroSpark
IHG has confirmed that it has entered into an agreement with EnviroSpark which will see electrical vehicle charging stations installed across all IHG-branded properties in the United States and Canada.
It will, however, be interesting to watch how quickly and how fully this rollout of EV stations is as the press release also says that “IHG hotels can now partner with EnviroSpark on EVCs depending on their individual needs and requirements“, and that seems to give individual properties the freedom to do the minimum required to be able say that they have complied with the rollout (i.e one charging point).
IHG says that it is “supporting hotel owners with an EV charging guide with best practices” to encourage installation of EV chargers across its portfolio, but I suspect that some hotel owners may need a bit more ‘encouragement’ than that.
Nevertheless, this is good news if you’re an IHG fan who drives an electric vehicle (or who rents them), as even though we’re seeing more and more properties with charging points, a lot of them are for Teslas only, and that’s not particularly helpful if you’re not a fan of Elon Musk and don’t drive a Tesla.
Presumably, the EV stations installed in partnership with EnviroSpark will be useable by a wide variety of cars, and that should make life considerably less stressful for IHG guests traveling with a non-Tesla electric vehicle.
EV charging info added to the IHG app
A further point that came out of today’s press release was one that covered EV charging and the IHG app – an EV-charger search filter has now been added to the app.
I’m not sure exactly when this was added, but for readers for whom this will be useful, this is where to find it:
Perform a hotel search as normal and on the results page, tap on the filter icon in the top-left corner.
This opens up the filter options (unsurprisingly!) but as the EV option isn’t one of the first shown, you’ll need to tap on the ‘view more’ link.
Now, you should see the EV option. After you select it, tap on ‘apply’ to go back to the results page.
All the properties you now see on the results page should be properties that offer some kind of EV charging, and to see exactly what those options are, select an individual property and then tap on the ‘parking and transportation’ link.
This is where you’ll see exactly what the property offers EV drivers, and in this property’s case you can see an issue that I mentioned earlier.
There are 10 charging stations on the property (great), but all 10 will only charge Tesla vehicles (not so great).
Hopefully, this is an issue that the new agreement between IHG and EnviroSpark will gradually eliminate.
Bottom line
IHG has told us that it has entered into an agreement with EnviroSpark which will (over an unspecified period of time) see EV charging stations rolled out to its 4,100+ properties in the United States and Canada. Given the rate at which the EV market appears to be expanding, this rollout can’t come soon enough.
