What if sustainability policies reduce profits – would hotel and tourism companies still do them?
What if sustainability policies reduce profits – would hotel and tourism companies still do them?Sustainable tourism practices must move on to the next level or the industry risks facing a consumer backlash’.
Consumers are done with what they see as the Linen Card trick: their bed linen gets washed only if they put the
card on the bed. A friend forwarded me a welcome email he got from the GM of a five-star hotel in Hong Kong after he made a booking there. It said: “You are highly encouraged to use your bed linen more than once as part of our green initiative.” He had barely arrived.
We’re still in the phase where the green buck lies with the traveller, who is highly encouraged to pay for his carbon footprint, cut waste and save energy, as our roundtable on tourism sustainability, printed in the last issue (October 10, 2014), showed. We flag these initiatives as our green moves although it’s the consumer who does the job. Sure, we do play some role too – we make our hotel building green, install low-flow faucets and showerheads, recycle furiously, etc. Yes, all these practices do benefit the environment, but these are efficiency measures, not sustainability policies, and they increase company profits, not reduce them. Any wonder if guests see red instead of green (like my friend who got the welcome email)? Instead of educating guests to be environment-friendly, are we turning them off it?
What if sustainability policies reduce profits – would hotel and tourism companies still do them? Sustainable development has been defined in many ways but the most frequently quoted is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It’s not about cost-cutting. The tourism industry should think of this definition deeply and come up with deeper sustainability policies.
I like, for example, Shangri-La Villingili Resort & Spa Maldives’ partnership with local farmers, which won the resort a HICAP Sustainable Award last week. It provided funds to build four greenhouses, which the farmers could not afford. The cooperative paid back the funds within 10 months, and additional facility and technology enhancements will be funded on a similar basis. Since 2010, the resort has bought over 233,000kg of locally-grown fruits and vegetables, while the local community has started to buy as well, which not only enhances farmer incomes but gives locals a wider variety of highly nutritious fruits and vegetables. Today, the cooperative supports the livelihoods of 93 farmers.
But these kinds of measures invariably require companies to pour in an investment at the start (which reduces profits) and evaluate rewards they will achieve only in the long run, compared with the current gains to the bottom line firms gain immediately by cutting costs through efficiency measures.
Nevertheless, scale the next bar the industry must, for in the future consumers and regulators will be ever more demanding about how firms behave, as our roundtable heard.
For them, the Linen Card trick will no longer do.
