If you were an FT journalist and had to come up with an amazing headline for this subject, what would it be?
Making sustainability sexy. My topic is: Fifty Shades of Green.
Sustainable tourist is somebody who will be a conscious citizen. They don't want to think about having to take care of the environment when they're on holiday. They want the hotels or the people that they encountered to be doing that.
The easy and super low-hanging fruits that we could take forward that would make a huge difference could be stop importing water. So easily done. We all have good tap water in Europe. Or you buy local water, or you put in a filtration station, whatever you want to do, but stop importing water. And as long as you don't see anything dirty in it, drink it.
Key cards. When they were invented and introduced, they were a great invention, because people would lose their keys, otherwise, these you could reprogram. But now we have plastic key cards everywhere creating waste everywhere. So embrace technology. Open your rooms through a phone app. Or just go back to really charming lovely old keys with a nice keyring ring that people will appreciate and they know where they are.
You don't need to use any toxic cleaning products. They come in pink and in greens and in purples. They're easy to recognise. Stop using them. You could just even clean your room with lemon, soda baking powder, and with vinegar, and add some essential oils that smell good to you that come from the country that you're in. Bingo.
Giving people vouchers if they don't want housekeeping. They stay at your hotels for two nights, why do they need housekeeping? A lot of people are happy to say, that's OK, I'll hang up my own towel if you give me a voucher for a gin and tonic.
I think there's tonnes of investment opportunities in sustainable tourism and the sustainable space overall. Hotel energy conservation can save hotels a massive amount of money. They've got standard rates, because they don't know what they're doing during the day with electricity or at nighttime with the electricity. And we now have all these amazing smart metres that we can use in order to show us what we're using in the different areas of the hotel, and then efficiently manage it, control it, and reduce the consumption.
There's investing into circular economy materials which are then going to be used by hotels. And I think anything going into finding the right technological solutions is a great investment.
