After a last-minute VRBO cancellation, a stay at New York’s Hotel Indigo Lower East Side revealed a boutique property with genuine neighborhood credentials — and an IHG sustainability program with measurable ambitions to match.
The rental looked perfect on the screen: a two-bedroom walk-up in the Lower East Side with exposed brick, a tiny loft, and a host with five-star reviews. Then, just before check-in, radio silence. No instructions from the host had been delivered. Their voicemail was full. Chats in the app went unanswered. VRBO’s own support team had no luck getting through, either. All they could offer was to cancel the stay. The refund was processing, but I was staring at a moody, jet-lagged tween and nowhere to stay.
A friend suggested Hotel Indigo on the Lower East Side, and I booked it immediately — half out of desperation, half because I’d heard enough about the property to be curious. What I found was a boutique hotel rooted so deeply in its neighborhood that it felt more like the cozy rental we’d been dreaming about than the gentrification that neighborhood has been fighting against for decades.
I spent many years (and many long nights) romping through the Lower East Side for yoga classes, dining, and dancing. But I was always coming in from my Jersey City apartment, never thinking about where one might stay in the city. The few times I’ve returned to New York since moving to Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago, I typically parked myself at the Soho Grand — but two beds in a room are rare there. My 12-year-old is about 90 percent leg these days, and whenever we share a bed, those legs often wind up in the same spot they did while she was still in my belly: right in the ribs.
The Lower East Side has long been a hub for art, music, and culture, with Katz’s Delicatessen, the Bowery, and the East Village within easy reach. The hotel’s interiors make that context immediate: a bold lobby mural by graffiti legend Lee Quiñones reflects the neighborhood’s artistic roots and sets the tone. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the city in every room, and on the rooftop, a seasonal pool looks out over lower Manhattan in a way that quickly resolves any lingering resentment about the VRBO fiasco.
Our hotel room was spacious — even more so by New York standards — and, critically, came with two queen-sized beds. The room featured hardwood floors, a spa-caliber shower, C.O. Bigelow bath amenities, and a locally sourced mini-bar stocked alongside Garnier Thiébaut linens. The hotel has 294 rooms, including four luxury suites and a duplex penthouse, but nothing about the property feels scaled for volume. While service tends to be the first casualty when a boutique concept goes wide, the service we received was genuinely attentive. A late, last-minute check-in was flawless, as was my request for extra blankets. There was always someone smiling, opening a door, holding an elevator.
A brand standard that actually means something
A global study commissioned by IHG Hotels and Resorts of 9,000 adults found that 60 percent want to be more environmentally and socially conscious about their trips — and within that segment, 82 percent said it was important to choose a hotel brand that operates responsibly. Hotel Indigo’s parent company, IHG Hotels and Resorts, hasn’t left those numbers on a slide deck. Its Journey to Tomorrow program — a ten-year responsible business plan aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals — commits the company to reducing carbon emissions, pioneering minimal-waste hospitality, and conserving water in communities at greatest risk. The plan includes a 2030 science-based target delivering a 46 percent absolute reduction in carbon dioxide emissions across franchised, managed, owned, leased, and managed-lease hotels, with a parallel goal of having 100 percent of new-build hotels operate at very low or zero carbon emissions.
“Journey to Tomorrow embodies IHG’s strengthened commitment to make sure we do what’s right, not just what’s needed,” former IHG CEO Keith Barr said when the plan launched. “[W]e’re on a journey to be successful in every sense of the word, and we are determined to contribute towards positive social and economic change, to stand up for key issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion, and human rights, and to make more responsible environmental choices.”
IHG’s ongoing decarbonization efforts have already driven an 11.5 percent reduction in carbon emissions per available room and a 9.4 percent reduction in energy per available room in 2024 compared to 2019. The company acknowledges that total carbon emissions remain above 2019 levels due to portfolio growth, but it has continued to invest in tools and infrastructure to close that gap. Chief Sustainability Officer Catherine Dolton said in a LinkedIn post last year that as the company navigates the challenges and opportunities ahead, “collaboration remains key — with our hotel owners, colleagues, guests and partners all playing critical roles in our sustainability journey.”
Underpinning those commitments at the property level is the IHG Green Engage system, an innovative online environmental sustainability platform that gives hotels the means to measure and manage their impact on the environment, with more than 200 Green Solutions designed to help reduce energy, water, and waste. Properties that complete Level 3 certification within the system can achieve energy savings of up to 25 percent. The platform is a global brand standard — every IHG hotel participates — and it feeds directly into corporate client sustainability reporting, making the data useful beyond the property level.
Hotel Indigo’s approach to neighborhood immersion may seem incidental, but it is also structural. Every Hotel Indigo property is uniquely designed to reflect the culture, character, and history of its surrounding neighborhood. On the Lower East Side, that means the Quiñones mural isn’t there just as decoration, but as a living testament. The area’s layered immigrant history, its transition through punk and hip-hop and art movements, its current tension between gentrification and cultural continuity: all of that informs how the property looks, what it recommends, and what it serves.
The VRBO falling through forced a recalibration, a reassessment of what it meant to trust that a host will always make me feel at home. The apartment rental fantasy — cooking breakfast, books on the shelf, pretending briefly that we live somewhere else — gives way to something arguably much better: a hotel that already knows what we need, knows the neighborhood better than we do, and whose parent company is working, methodically and publicly, on making the whole enterprise less harmful to the places it inhabits.
Inside the lobby, as we were checking in that night, a large photo of one of my heroes, Erykah Badu, stood just behind the desk. We share the same birthday (although she’s a bit older than I am). Even though we’ve never met, that invisible connection has always made her music feel even more special to me, more familiar. It’s a bit like that feeling I get when I think about home. A good hotel should offer that, too. With Ms. Badu staring in my direction, I immediately felt at ease. We had indeed landed at the right place after all.
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