Hotels and resorts around Southeast Asia are failing to understand the “green premium” and how to leverage it to attract quality guests, according to leading figures in the region’s hospitality industry.
The message that hotels and resorts are falling behind counterparts in other parts of the globe when it comes to sustainable tourism, was one of the major takeaways from PHIST (Phuket Hotels for Islands Sustaining Tourism), Southeast Asia’s largest sustainability forum, held last week.
Jesper Palmqvist, STR Global’s Area Director for Asia Pacific, hosted a roundtable where figures from top resort names discussed environmental best practices moving forward. He agreed that the hospitality industry in Southeast Asia needs to be more proactive about enacting meaningful changes.
“It is important that the industry develops green champions, best practice documents and training modules that can be modified by hotels, and thus stay ahead of the curve,” he said.
Shown in photo is Laguna Phuket, transformed from a barren moonscape of scarred land—abandoned by the tin mining industry and declared as uninhabitable by the UN—into Southeast Asia’s leading integrated resort development.