Last month at Phuket Hotels for Islands Sustaining Tourism (PHIST) 2023, Greenview CEO and founder Eric Ricaurte urged Phuket hotels to unite in benchmarking themselves against existing data to measure where they stand in terms of climate impact.
In an analysis by Greenview, Phuket’s hotels emerged as the third-lowest consumers of water among nine surveyed South-east Asian cities, and also showed promising restraint in energy consumption, ranking second least. The cities considered for this comparative study included major hubs like Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta.
Phuket’s resorts were not included in the study.
Recently released findings from the Office of the National Water Resources show the resort island is already facing water shortage issues. The office recently called on Phuket hospitality to reduce water consumption, as demand for water supply is predicted to intensify progressively with tourist growth.
Ricaurte has said that the island’s resort-centric composition contributes to high water usage overall.
“Resorts typically consume a lot more water, with bigger swimming pools, more towels to wash, more amenities, and more expansive landscapes and gardens,” he explained.
Ricaurte lauded resorts for incorporating sustainable practices more thoroughly despite their increased resource intensities, saying that resorts also tend to do more to incorporate the best practices of sustainability.
In praising Thai hotels and resorts for their widespread adoption of glass water bottles, a rarity in South-east Asia, Ricaurte highlighted the disparity in sustainability performances across the country.
He emphasised the imperative need for a local industry standard, asserting that “out of 100 Thai hotels, the worst 25 can be very poor-performing”, thus pulling down the collective sustainability performance.
“The opportunity in Phuket is to collaborate through initiatives like PHIST or the Phuket Hotels Association to encourage the more poor-performing hotels to improve,” stressed Ricaurte.
He urged Phuket hotels to unite in benchmarking themselves to uplift the industry standard by adopting robust tools such as Greenview’s Hotel Footprinting Tool.
The tool has been updated to provide more accurate calculations of hotel stay footprints using the results of the latest Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index 2023 which references a dataset of over 27,000 hotels.
It can be used to calculate the carbon footprint of hotel stays or meetings anywhere in the world, and also enables hotels to discern their standings and identify improvement areas in energy, water, and carbon metrics.
Editor’s note: A correction has been made to this article. The previous version incorrectly stated that Phuket’s hotels emerged as the third-highest consumers of water among nine surveyed South-east Asian cities.
