28 | SUSTAINABILITY WORDS | Gordon Miller
BUSINESS
www.opp.org.uk | FEBRUARY 2012 Go green in 2012
The turn of a New Year is a time to take stock and to look forward. It is a time to think about where you are where you want to to be, and how best to go about making the changes necessary to improve things. So, to help get you in the right mood, OPP’s sustainability correspondent Gordon Miller does a little bit of crystal ball gazing to speculate what the immediate future might hold for our industry as 2012 gets underway.
resort: essentially, the merging of a classic hotel holiday resort with a private, freehold residential housing development model. Already, we are seeing the realisation of the movement at Freedom Bay in St Lucia, where Six Senses Resorts & Spas will operate the concern as an integrated resort hotel.
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The luxury hotelier Six Senses is widely acknowledged as the leading sustainable operator worldwide. It owns and operates several resorts in the Maldives and Thailand, all operating along the same model.
Elsewhere, integrated sustainable resorts are in development – and are selling well – or in advanced planning stages in countries such as Brazil, Kenya, Morocco, Cambodia,
ne trend I believe we will see ever more of in 2012 is the sustainable integrated
Montenegro, Spain, Grenada and Croatia to name but a few. And Katrina Craig, managing director of consultancy Hotel in a Box and a consultant to the Hotel Solutions Partnership, has noted a growing trend towards ‘mixed-use’ over the past fi ve years.
According to Craig: “A successful model will incorporate a profi table hotel, sold residential units, a leisure component that breaks even (it’s a service to draw users), some form of club membership, and rented out commercial and retail units.
“Factors to turn the components into a well-oiled and profi table machine include: year-round accessibility (to maximise revenue opportunities 365 days a year); a mix of business and leisure guests (‘shoulder’ seasons when holiday makers stay away are the main conference time, so there’s no lull in business); good community
maintenance (a given) and a strong destination marketing programme (without which hotel rooms won’t rent and residential units won’t sell). “Critically, there needs to be synergy between the resort’s entities and harmony between users/owners – not
“The quality and sustainability of construction is increasingly paramount”
always reconcilable when the different factors often have divergent interests and profi t drivers,” adds Kraig. “For example, hotel guests have no long-term stake in their holiday destination, but villa owners do. Their differing aspirations and needs have to be understood, planned and managed at an infrastructure level too. For example,
building in greater privacy for owners compared to units used by guests.” The developer/owner/operator – and there is an increasing number of these - has different motivations to the developer/builder. Obviously, the former considers the long-term consequences of his decisions far more so than the latter because he will have to live with them. The quality and sustainability of construction is increasingly paramount to the developer/owner.
Operating costs for energy effi cient buildings are signifi cantly lower than for non-effi cient entities.
Key drivers compelling hotel and resort owners and operators to change include compliance (legislation), risk mitigation - energy, water and waste prices are rising worldwide. Onsite micro-generation enables owner-operators to take control of,
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