Coming through the green door

THE meeting planner walked into his appointment with the hotel manager and immediately asked: “How green are you?”

The question didn’t floor the executive. He has become conditioned to expect such a grilling. 

Minaz Abji, executive vice president of Host Hotels and Resorts, said: “Meeting planners want to know what you have done. They say ‘We can book a room in three hotels…what are you doing?

“Can they provide a green meeting?

“Governments are legislating that their meetings will be only in green hotels and so if you are not prepared you won’t do business.”

Talking at WTM’s World Responsible Tourism Day Hoteliers’ Debate, Abji added: “In Florida and California, the states are certifying hotels by a green stars system. You must have one star for a meeting. 

“Customers and companies are making things happen. It is amazing, the number of companies who ask where we are on sustainability. Hoteliers will need to do it to get business.

“You become better every year.

“In the United States we have been behind Canada and Europe and elsewhere. If we didn’t do anything about it we would be in trouble.

“We saw a tsunami – a positive one - coming in with the green movement – and green takes in all sorts of sustainability” he said.

“We wanted to make sure that we were a step ahead of the curve. We can deliver on sustainability. It’s a journey – we won’t arrive overnight.

“We wanted to create our own programme and realised we didn’t have the tools or infrastructure or knowledge and linked with International Tourism Partnership. We have made sure that the hotels we own use the tools.
The next one we implement will measure sustainability and help us educate. “

Host has 117 hotels in North and South America, ten in Europe. Their general managers’ annual meeting this year had the theme Going Green.

“We are measuring the consumption that we have reduced in water, energy, waste and we are taking a lot of steps.

“All the major brands that we work with have programmes. No, they aren’t where they should be because of starting late but I can tell you in the next two to three years you will see some phenomenal progress.”

Minaz admitted: “We save money to improve margins but we do good things in the community that we don’t tell the customer about. Our capital costs are a little higher but we feel it is the right thing to do. We don’t broadcast it.

“We spent $650million renovating hotels last year. We recycled carpet instead of putting it in landfill. It cost us $5,000 a project, but that is nothing against spending five, six million dollars. We should do it as a good corporate citizen.

“We recycle vinyl wall-covering. We buy carpets with 25 per cent nylon that recycle.

“We plough back the savings into sustainable construction, products that are longer lasting and easily available. “

Hiran Cooray, managing director of Jetwing, from Sri Lanka, said that heI believed local government strict regulations definitely help. If you leave everything to the businessmen, he added they will take short cuts.

“I don’t think giving the whole profit back to the community from a hotel will happen”, he explained. “ Shareholders must get something back otherwise nobody will invest in tourism.

“But you can see how employees move from a hut to a brick-built home, from walking to a push bike then motor bike.

“Tourism is one of main foreign income sources into the country. As a company we have been totally committed for the past ten years at least into making hotels sustainable.

“For instance, we took an abandoned paddi field and created a lake and started growing, using traditional methods; involved the local community, teaching English to children over 18, training them into our industry, created wildlife habitat. It became a best practice study to be used in other parts of the world.

“Making Sri Lanka carbon neutral won’t happen easily. It will take some time.

“We have reduced a lot but haven’t yet started measuring it. All hotels in Sri Lanka recycle water. We are experimenting with wind power. We hope two hotels will be totally powered by this and solar.”

Andrew Jones, founder and guardian of Sanctuary Resort, said that he did not know if as an industry we fully understand carbon emissions offset.

“Does that mean we can burn all the fuel we want and plant a few trees and have done our job?” he asked. “I want it explained to me better. I do it as part of business because it is part of our ethos, but not part of marketing.“

Sustainability coming in different forms was illustrated by his anecdote: “We set up an 18-room resort in Cambodia that funds a not- for- profit school. We graduate 26 young people every nine months.

“They can go and work anywhere. From that 18 room project comes involvement with 12 villages; we have built several hundred water wells and started a sewing school.

“We never thought it was going to happen like that. Guests became interested and their donations funded lot of that work.”

Ends.