Why did you seek EarthCheck certification?
 We assessed a range of certification schemes before determining that EarthCheck was the most suitable for us. There’s a tendency among hoteliers to reinvent the wheel when it comes to environmental management systems and we quickly realised that it simply wouldn’t be cost efficient.

Besides the ongoing overhead that this would have caused in having to annually update the system to ensure it remained compliant with international standards, we really wanted to be able to benchmark our performance against others.

How is the program managed?
The EarthCheck Program taught us how to establish a Green Team from existing resources. Our team has buy-in from the top and includes representatives from every department. EarthCheck helps us to capacity-build our own people and lessens our reliance on external consultants.

As for measuring such things as energy consumption and waste to landfill, the hardest part was the initial set-up. It’s at that time that you need to revisit exactly what information you record from suppliers and change is always a challenge when first faced with it.

What has been achieved?
We are continually striving to reduce water use and implement water-efficiency measures. We’ve upgraded the cooling towers, all guestrooms now have water-efficient fixtures and we’re using recycled water from the new sewage treatment plant for keeping the gardens lush.

An incentive programme encourages employees to contribute ideas and create opportunities to reduce energy and water consumption. This has saved 15,000 kW h of energy annually since 2007 (one light bulb burning for 30 days uses 3kW h of energy). Additional savings came from the modification of the Building Automation System.

We also adjusted the timer for the boiler and hot water system, switching it off for two hours in the day and three hours at night. This has not impacted guests or operations and has reduced consumption by 50 litres per day.

What environmental challenges are you still facing?
The challenge for tourism in Vietnam is to manage the pressure that popularity places on a location. Take Ha Long Bay for example, tourism has been a double-edged sword resulting in pollution of its spectacular bays and pressure on fishing villages.

We must collectively address these problems by encouraging everyone who is using such sites to keep them in a pristine state.