Anand Rao is the general manager of the ITC Royal Gardenia, probably the greenest hotel in India. He talks to ABTN about why savvy hoteliers are going green.
The ITC Royal Gardenia gained its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) platinum status in December. It is the first hotel in India to be platinum rated, and the largest in the world to achieve the rating.
Rao said this would not have been possible if the project had not been built from scratch. "This isn't something you can apply for when you're completing the building, you have to design it from the beginning," he says.
To achieve the platinum award, the hotel had to prove to the Indian representatives of the US Green Building Council, which oversees the LEED programme, that it had achieved key environmental standards, such as through energy efficient lighting and air conditioning systems. "The Gardenia consumes abound 35% less energy than a similar hotel of the same built-up space," says Rao.
Waste water is treated and then used in the gardens, along with rain water. The hotel also uses plants to provide natural air conditioning. "We have vertical gardens in the lobby, with plants from floor to ceiling. These are the green lungs of the hotel."
The hotel has also been designed not to need much air conditioning in the public spaces. The architects created natural wind channels through the hotel, to keep it fresh.
For Rao, the biggest challenge in the process was "actualising and executing what the infrastructure was supposed to do for you". They were constantly measuring and re-measuring things to make sure they had it right, everything down to the thickness of the bricks.
"Every metric needed to be measured to make sure we were getting what we were going to promise to our customers," says Rao.
And customer feedback has been good, he said. "Our customers are talking about how beautiful the hotel is, but they are also being educated by us, about green practices."
The green hotel is still a fairly new idea in India, explains Rao. "I suspect a lot of hotels will follow this trend in years to come... especially as we also use it as a marketing tool.
"ITC has used this as a competitive strategy. We now have this unique position of having a luxury hotel which has become Platinum rated, which is so difficult to achieve... We have a hotel which is sustainable in the long term, over the next 20 to 25 years."
Rao joined the hotel business from college in the early 1980s. "A lot of my friends were working in the hotel business at that time and said the hospitality industry in India was going to go through a big boom.
"The Asian Games were due to be held in India in 1982, which would attract a lot of visitors.
"I was quite uncertain as to what I wanted to do, so took the advice of friends. That was the start of a very long career and I'm very happy I chose what I did."
He has been with ITC hotels since he first started his hotel career, starting out at the Maurya Luxury Collection in Dubai, before moving on to Agra and Aurangabad. He was then offered a French scholarship to study in Paris, where he completed a masters course in hospitality management.
Two years later, he returned to India and went on to manage ITC hotels in Patnam, Chennai, Bangalore and Bombay. When the opportunity to oversee the opening of the Royal Gardenia arose, Rao moved back to his hometown, Bangalore, in 2007.
Rao said he enjoys the business because no two days are the same. "It's all about different situations and you really develop as a person, in terms of your personality, confidence, leadership and communication abilities.
"No book can really tell you how to go about resolving an issue. I think it's only in hotels that you come across so many different, unpredictable things."
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