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Sustainability is now a strategic priority — and technology is the key to scaling it. We learn how travel brands are using data, automation, and IoT to cut waste, drive ESG compliance, and build authentic, measurable green strategies that align with both guest values and business goals.
We bring you excerpts from the panel discussion on the topic ‘Smart, Sustainable, Scalable: The Role of Tech in Greener Travel’ which took place at TDM Global Summit Singapore 2025.
The session was moderated by Nisha Abu Bakar, founder, World Women Tourism, Panellists include: Nick Lim, CEO, Asia, The Travel Corporation; Ailynn Seah, chief executive officer, The Lumiere Consultancy; Patrick Andres, regional vice-president hotels, Oracle Hospitality and Sonny Chionh, executive director, RSP
Gap between ‘intention and closure’ in Sustainability
Bakar queried the panellists on: When you work with travel companies or hotels, what’s the biggest gap you see between their sustainability intentions and what’s actually happening on the ground? What’s stopping them from turning good intentions into action?
Sonny stated that him being an architect and coming from construction feels that they need more transparency, more data is needed to harness it in the correct direction. The onus remains on the enlightenment of the hotel owners and their understanding of sustainability.
Patrick stated the Gap between intentions and reality is the conflict about believing in sustainability and fearing how it impacts the guest. “I think its all-good intentions, so they want to leave a smaller footprint, they want to do the right thing in terms of how they manage an enterprise in a sustainable way but then the second they believe it will impact their consumers their guest, then they make the wrong decisions. Air-conditioned, water, etc, that’s a dilemma that they still fighting. The hotel guests are saying yes, we want sustainability but as long as it does not impact how cold I can make my room.”
Sustainability is everybody’s business
Nisha stated: “Customer experience and embracing sustainability, looking at the customer journey at every single touch point, how do we ensure sustainability is embedded but at the same time it does not compromise in experience in our hospitality industry. We need to find the balance.
Ailynn stated: I think there are two main points one is lack of accountability among hotels and travel agents and when you go to a company they have the most beautiful policy statement. So, the middle management or the person in charge of the project would know the details but not everyone else. However, sustainability is everybody’s business and everyone needs to be involved. In hospitality we collect huge data mainly to utilize it for revenue optimisation. Most of this data is utiilised for results not improvement. However, there is a huge scope for utilising, especially environmental data, in sustainability, like why do your energy costs go up? why did your water consumption go down? Why did the wate per centage become higher, so all of that data is very important. This is imperative and not an option any more, because if you’re not sustainable your out of the game.”
Nick said that while planning the itineraries tour operators need to go down right to the grassroots to make an impact. He said that when you say are consumers ready to pay, the economics answer to that is yes. “And every consumer of a product will be willing to pay a certain premium, right? That’s sort of like organic food. Everybody knows, oh, equal to equal, it’s better that it’s organic. How much more am I willing to pay? Twice, maybe not, a certain percentage, maybe. And that’s dependent on the particular consumer.”
Sourcing food locally
“The flip side to that is I think there is a very strong argument to be made that to be sustainable, so I’m thinking of hotels or resorts in different parts of the world, to locally source everything, it’s not a question of is the consumer willing to pay more for that, but perhaps there’s a, without talking about the social good of it, it could also be much cheaper for the hotel, right?
I go to a resort in Thailand, why do I want to eat blueberries, right, when I have all this wonderful tropical fruit around? So I think there’s a very strong argument for the value of sustainability, doing things locally, socially responsible for the community, on the cost side much more than on the consumer side, and to a certain degree, almost educate the guests. You’re coming to talk about local experiences, right? So if I’m Bob from Pittsburgh, right? I go to Thailand, I’ve never had, you know, rambutan or some other fruit, educate that person on local fruits grown by local farmers.”
Nisha queried: “So when you talk about smart technology, right, and smart technology solutions, it’s an investment, right? And just like sustainability is deemed as a cost as an expense, so is smart technology seen as a cost as an expense as well. What is your most compelling business case to asset managers or hotels to embrace smart technology for sustainable objectives and implementations?
Sourcing Building Martials locally
Sonny Chionh said: “We have to put to the hoteliers that building a building, the life cycle costing for the building itself is easily 60% of a building or a hotel that’s going to last you for 20, 30 years. So, this 60% is carbon footprint. And imagine, of course, you know, everyone knows about the embodied carbon that goes to a building and the operative carbon that you use, you know, in operating the hotel. So, I think we have to realise that building a building can cost quite a fair bit, not just in monetary terms, but in terms of carbon footprint.
You know, on my visits to Phuket or Koh Samui or even Bali, they are very resourceful in vernacular architecture. And, you know, the basics of vernacular architecture is really using the resource that they have in the country rather than, take all the marvels that are coming from, say, Italy or, you know, from Turkey. Because a huge transport that comes down into the construction. It doesn’t make sense at all. It just creates this huge carbon footprint that we are just having to deal with. So that cost has to be borne in mind early at the onset.”
Sustainable leadership should be driven from the top.
Patrick Andres added: “So the technology plays a key role in many aspects, right? So we’re familiar with, you know, energy management, water management, et cetera. But even at its, very basic level, a lot of what we don’t even talk about is data. There’s tonnes of data. Data doesn’t equal paper, right? Unfortunately, it still does. But, you know, having reporting completely paperless, having check-ins completely paperless, having all of these things done.
“When you say who’s responsible for, you know, any kind of sustainable initiative, I think it needs to be driven right from the top, right? It needs to be seen as a priority, not as a tagline, right? The company I work for, Oracle, we are guilty of using a huge amount of energy. But right from the top, there’s a directive. We measure everything at Oracle. Everything is calculated, everything is measured, right? And everything has a clear objective.
So we have an objective by the end of this year, 36 days or so, to use reusable energy in all of our data centres. And by 2050, and don’t get mad at me because the date’s quite far, we want to be as a company net zero. But at least there’s a measurable, clear message from the top down through the organisation.”
Regular monitoring and savings as ROI
Patrick said: “There’s a chain here based in Singapore, very passionate. The CEO is very passionate. And I know that he charts the savings that he’s making every year by implementing these policies. And unless it hits the balance sheet or the P&L statement, it’s very difficult to just evangelise. Right? Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do. Everyone knows that many things are the right things to do.
But unless there’s a real payoff for a business, it won’t get done. And I think, Eileen, you would face this on a day-to-day basis when organisations have to go for GSTC certifications, and then they question the bottom line. So how do you address issues like this? And I think you battle this on an everyday basis.
There’s two sides to the scale. I want to talk about the bigger scale first because I came from Marina Bay Fence for 13 years. We invested heavily on the building management system. Billions of dollars. But because it was so sophisticated and it was a huge operation, it could pinpoint exactly which area there’s a surge in energy, which area there’s a surge in water, for example.
And to cut the whole long story short, in a nutshell, we were able to achieve within the first year a 15% savings. And if you work that into the ROI, because we had to come up from millions of dollars, it just, from 15, it went to 18 to 20, and then it just kept going. But to Patrick’s point, I think setting goals is very important because things that don’t get tracked and measured, nothing’s going to happen.
So I’ve worked with some independent hotels and small hotels, so what are some of the operational steps you can take? And there’s some things as simple as like I’ve seen one hotel, they just do rain water harvest and not just waiting for the rain, they collect the water condensation and they use that to wash their public area and save them a similar amount of money and water every year, which is resource.
So when they start segregating waste, and then like, for example, in the kitchen, we use a lot of cooking, what do you do with all of that? And then when they make a deliberate effort to make sure that this all is being sold or given to a company to recycle, and then they realise and they get paid for it, and they didn’t know they get paid for people coming to collect this all. And you know, over time, people just be cautious effort, and the same things will come that way.”
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