Is sustainability the new hallmark of luxury hospitality?

As CEO of two of the world’s swankiest hotel chains, Accor’s Raffles and Fairmont, Omer Acar is used to having his every wish met when he travels. Nevertheless, what often impresses him is what he is denied. For example, his favorite breakfast, avocado toast.

“I’m super impressed with a hotel when they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have avocado, because it’s not the season,’” Acar says. It’s preferable to have local and seasonally available options — which offer guests a sense of destination and culture — as opposed to having everything available everywhere, with no regard for the damage to the climate that effort can cause.

“I’m more impressed with that attitude, which has sophistication,” he says. “The answer is that you don’t have to offer everything to everybody, but you have to have a good alternative to everything.”

That’s an important concept for the hospitality industry. Tourism is a vital economic engine for many regions, but it also carries climate costs. Recently, Acar chatted with Mastercard Chief Sustainability Officer Ellen Jackowski at the Global Inclusive Growth Summit in Washington, D.C., about how demand for sustainable tourism is growing, why it makes business sense and how it can benefit local communities.

This is an edited and condensed version of their conversation.

Jackowski: When you think about luxury, rewind the clock a couple of years, five years ago maybe, did you think about sustainability? I don’t think you did. Luxury and sustainability were kind of opposing forces. But something has changed. What’s changed? Now these words are merging, I think, of course, for the better. What was the trigger?

Acar: If you asked me this question five years ago, sustainability was something that nobody wanted to hear in the luxury hospitality world. The idea was always ‘We have to say yes to everything.’ The focus was only pleasing the guest and sometimes not using the most sustainable solution.

We at Accor were a little bit ahead of the game. We didn’t wait for legislation to come. You don’t want to be chasing; you want to be leading. We have many sustainability activations in our hotels. At Fairmont Toronto, we renovated the hotel with the objective of dropping our CO₂ emissions to 80%. That comes with a result of removing 1,566 cars annually from traffic. In Raffles and Fairmont in Manila, we eliminated buying water. We invested a little bit of money and we eliminated 368,000 plastic bottles a year.

Maybe guests don’t choose the hotel because it has a sustainability certification. But I can tell you, they will not come back to that hotel if they are ignoring it.

Jackowski: When you think about some of the trade-offs, some of those investments you need to make, how do you think about sustainability adding value to your brand? And in terms of the business model, how is that evolving?

Acar: What is beautiful and great about sustainability is that the numbers are there. So it’s not a hard argument. If you install a double-glazed window for cooling and heating, you burn less fuel to maintain certain temperatures. It’s automatically giving them a return on investment. The business case is made already. We did a little study within the ownership structures, and 64% of owners are very ready to make sustainable investments because they believe that the financial returns are high.

When we talk about food wastage, should we eliminate buffets? Hoteliers tend to say, “We have so many guests in the hotel, they are all coming to the restaurant for breakfast, so we cannot afford not to have them.” Guests want to eat quickly. But the answer is, the money that you save from eliminating food wastage can actually create more jobs for those who serve.

Jackowski: You operate in 35 countries, 100 different properties. That’s a lot of different cultures, a lot of different types of foods. How are you thinking from an inclusive point of view about the communities you’re serving and the way that shows up to your guests?

Acar: I believe that food and beverage is going through a transformation. Chefs 20 years ago were focusing most on creating recipes. But today they have all become great procurement talents, because what they want to do is find the best tomato, they want to find a wild-caught fish. They want to get the freshest ingredients, seasonal ingredients. Again, it’s my avocado question: Do you have to have it 12 months a year? Do you have to eat cherries in February? No, you don't. But here are other beautiful delicacies. And it’s better for your health if you follow that seasonality.

As far as the environment and focusing on local farming, it’s very important. We operate big hotels, and we just want to make sure that the local culture and local communities also participate and benefit from this, that they are part of the solution instead of one-solution-fits-all. What you do in New York and London doesn’t mean it works in Jakarta.

Jackowski: This tension that we started with, of luxury fighting sustainability, the transition is happening quite fast considering where we started from a couple of years ago. What’s next? Where are you innovating in this space?

Acar: Water consumption. We just said no to a hotel in Mykonos. Mykonos is quite dry. Sometimes your growth is based on how many hotels you open, but you’ve got to have a certain integrity and there are times that you’re going to say no, and we as Accor are proud to say that we said no to this project. You may choose a hotel for your vacation, but when you see that the hotel is totally ignoring sustainability efforts, you may not go back to that hotel. It’s no longer sustainable to stay in the business by ignoring sustainability efforts.