Have the Best New Hotels Laid Sustainable Foundations?

Intro

Welcome to issue 5! Last week, I reflected on how the timing of publishing the newsletter impacts its reach. This might be helpful for those considering starting their own newsletter, so please bear with me as I share my thoughts.

Currently, I publish on Thursdays to give myself enough time to write and to avoid competing with other popular publishing days. However, upon reflection, I believe Tuesday may be the optimal day for publishing (though I'm also open to testing Wednesday).

Writing and sharing your content is just the beginning. To maximise impact, you need to focus on distribution and reach. The reality is that not everyone will see your post when you first publish, so you need to promote it multiple times. However, this can be challenging because people who have already seen your notification may feel pestered or annoyed by subsequent alerts. Publishing earlier in the week also reduces the risk of your post becoming stale quickly, as the following days (Tuesday and Wednesday) tend to have higher engagement on LinkedIn compared to weekends.

Without overthinking or striving for perfection, I have decided to switch to a Tuesday publishing schedule starting from May 7th.

The 100 Best New Hotels of the Year

This week's newsletter was inspired by Travel + Leisure Co. 's list of "The 100 Best New Hotels of the Year." This list is a great resource for finding inspiration for your next getaway, provided you're willing to spend anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per night. Since these are newly built hotels, I was curious to see how much sustainability played a role in their construction and design from the outset.d played a role in their building up front.

Sustainability in the Luxury Hotel Industry

The luxury hotel industry approaches sustainability through the same ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) lens as other industries. To explore what this looks like in practice, I decided to use The The Ritz London as a baseline, given their transparency regarding materiality, and compare them against some of the new hotels. My expectation was to see many of these sustainability elements considered and incorporated from the beginning in these new properties.

However, this was not always the case. Many of these "brands" have their sustainability commitments and reporting governed by a larger parent group, and it is often assumed that the hotel in question has aligned itself with the parent company's ambitions. This lack of transparency and hotel-specific sustainability information is a significant oversight, as it fails to provide guests with a clear understanding of each property's individual efforts and progress towards sustainability goals.

The importance of sustainability to hotel guests is expected to rise, but at the time of writing, I had not encountered any data specifically addressing consumer habits in this area. However, I did stumble upon a compelling statement: "A survey by Virtuoso Travel found that 78% of luxury travellers prefer doing business with companies with strong sustainability policies". This finding underscores the growing demand for environmentally conscious practices within the luxury travel sector and highlights the need for hotels to prioritise and effectively communicate their sustainability efforts to attract and retain discerning guests.

Materiality for Luxury Hotels

Many of the hotel websites seemed to put little effort into communicating their sustainability efforts. This is quite glaring when compared to the extensive information readily available from luxury goods companies.

The text from the Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts Tokyo website serves as an example of this lack of communication, leaving me thinking they could do more.

I captured some of the aspects being considered in materiality below but ran out of time to do this comparison piece justice. Admittedly, it was an overly ambitious goal, even for my subset of 30 hotels. However, I believe this topic has value and is worth pursuing further, so I plan to develop it more thoroughly for my website. Upon reflection, I expect more from luxury hotels, especially given the high cost of occupancy and the fact that they provide experience-based services.

Energy Use: Energy reduction or Renewable energy

Hotel Transfers: Use of electric or hybrid vehicles.

Plastic Reduction: Reducing/Elimination of single use plastic.

Food and Drink: Sourcing local and organic produce.

Biophilic Design: Incorporation of nature into architecture

Water Reduction: Using less water through

Social: Support of charities, setting up responsible business initiatives

Pelorus Private Island owned by Morris Escapes had the highest occupancy rates at $13,067 per night for two. Browsing the Morris Escapes sustainability page reveals some of their initiatives indicated below. However, it is disappointing to note the lack of impact data and progress reporting. If the sustainable practices mentioned are indeed being implemented at Pelorus Private Island, the company should be actively promoting and sharing this information.

New Hotel Hotspots

This graph reveals the countries boasting more than 2 new hotels, with these 7 nations accounting for an impressive 50% of the list. Interestingly, Tripadvisor's Top Destination list largely mirrors the distribution of Travel and Leisures's new hotels list, with the notable exception of Vietnam – suggesting that any new Vietnamese hotels (if there were any) missed out on making the cut this year.

Hotspot Price Range

This second offers a glimpse into the nightly rates of these top-tier accommodations, comparing the low and high prices featured in the Travel and Leisure list for different hotels. Australia's rates are listed for double occupancy on the high price so slightly skew the data for solo travellers.

Annual CO₂ Emission Comparison

The last interesting aspect I explored was the CO₂ emissions of the countries with the most new hotels. According to Our World in Data, these emissions are attributed to fossil fuels and industry. Given my earlier point about the lack of data-driven impact reporting, understanding the policies and emerging legislation in these countries would also be of interest to me.

As I conclude my thoughts, having completed five weeks of this newsletter, I plan to create a more reflective post next week, sharing the numbers and my findings. This milestone presents an opportune moment to set a new direction and goals for my experiment now that I am more informed.

This post was first published on LinkedIn.