A new concept in hospitality puts the transformative potential of the world’s biggest hotel brands into the hands of local, family-owned businesses, allowing them to match the corporations in the transition to sustainable tourism.
The change was coming before COVID-19. The pandemic has only accelerated its arrival, and when the world can travel again, we will want to do so in not just a safer way, but also in a more considered and empathetic manner.
The jet-set profligacy and conspicuous consumption of the past will be replaced by a concern for carbon debt, by a desire for more equitable experience and the need to know that their holiday brings benefit rather than detriment to communities and environment.
The world’s hospitality giants have committed vast sums to CSR initiatives in order achieve these sustainability goals. Such investment is largely unavailable to the small independent hotelier and yet acquiring climate-positive benchmarking and brand reputation is not only an ethical imperative but also an essential to doing business in an increasingly climate-conscious marketplace.
The solution is to join Future Hotels. You can think of it as a brand, or as a movement. Either way, it’s going to change the hotel industry forever.
So, what’s in the box? First, a forest. Future Hotels will plant 1,000 trees at its reforestation project in Madagascar for every property that joins and plant another 1,000 trees per property per year. The brand aims to plant a total of 500,000 trees and enable all its hotels to become climate positive by 2026.
But reconciling the triple bottom line of people, planet and profitability requires more than planting trees. Future Hotels will build a pervasive, comprehensive, 360-degree sustainability action package for each hotel member, and the Future Hotels logo is their guarantee of commitment to the positive transformation of hospitality.
Next, there’s the opportunity to boost bookings, reduce distribution costs, maximise ancillary revenue, improve the guest experience and drive significantly higher profitability by accessing the economies of scale and cutting-edge technology once exclusive to the multinationals.
Member hotels also get global exposure across thousands of channels; low-cost internationally recognised COVID-19-safe certification; and access to a powerful sales and marketing toolkit enabling a real and measurable improvement to the bottom line, and the chance to go toe-to-toe with the biggest players.
Finally, 1% of affiliation fees is donated to local environmental and social causes.
Future Hotels was created by Sotiris Kopatsaris using solutions and best practices formulated, tried and tested at his family-run hotel, the award-winning Carpe Diem in Santorini, which became climate positive in 2020.
“We think that the world’s most important hotelier is our own planet and this belief drives everything we do. Sustainability has ceased to be an aspiration and has become an imperative, not just for the sake of business but also for the enrichment of society, culture and environment.” he said. “Evolution is thus no longer a choice but a necessity, regardless of size or location, and Future Hotels offers any property an effective, impressive and affordable means of achieving those sustainability goals.”
