Hotels & Sustainability
& s l e t o H ustainability S With more properties claiming to be ‘eco friendly’ than ever before, we asked Pauline Van Beneden from Ecotel Consultancy to help us unpick the truth from the greenwashing… Please introduce yourself and the Ecotel Consultancy? My name is Pauline Van Beneden and I am the co-CEO and hotel sustainability expert of Ecotel Consultancy (ecotelconsultancy.com), which is a sustainability consulting firm for hotels specialized in sustainability advice, consultancy and ecolabelling/certification guidance for hotels.
Low Season Traveller
Our mission is to make the hotel industry more sustainable by guiding hotels in every aspect of their business and keeping in mind the base principles of sustainability: making a positive impact on the environment, the society and the economy. We founded our company after my colleague and I met in a hotel where we stayed for our family holidays. To make a long story short, sustainability was not at all the norm in the hotel and certain practices made us question how we could do better. We found a mutual interest in the topic of sustainable hospitality as well as a drive to change these things. And so, our company was born.
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How are hotels becoming more sustainable today? As in all things, there are frontrunners and laggards when it comes to sustainability. While there are exemplary hotels that have implemented sustainability throughout the complete accommodation and operations, there are even more hotels who have not even started yet. However, as sustainability is becoming the norm in everyday life and
business, awareness of the sustainable mindset is being created globally. Consequently, the majority of hotels and other accommodations have already started to put steps in the right direction, some more than others. It must be said, however, that the majority of this group, has stagnated in their sustainability efforts and stopped at fancy policies and stickers on the wall asking guests to re-use their towels. There is of course nothing wrong with implementing the low-hanging fruit first as this is a good starting point for hotels, but there is still an incredible lot of work that must be done to get to a completely sustainable way of tourism. But I believe that the future is bright as hotels are being incentivized by all different hotel stakeholders, from policy makers to suppliers and of course the core of their business – hotel guests. These incentives are very necessary to get the laggards on the wagon and the ones that already started to keep moving. Is there still a lot of greenwashing going on in hotel accommodations? Guiding hotels on their sustainability journey allows us to see what happens behind the scenes which is unfortunately sometimes indeed greenwashing. However, it must be said that this is not always intentional. I have seen hotels that have tried to become more sustainable by buying for example ‘eco’ products for cleaning purposes, however Datai Hotel, Malaysia (right)
