Source: Elite Traveler
By Katharine Swindells | September 7 2021
EarthCheck, the leading environmental certification group from the travel and tourism industry, has announced a new partnership with luxury hotel brand Belmond.
EarthCheck, which supports the tourism sector by measuring and benchmarking consumption and waste in order to improve sustainability, has signed a deal with the LVMH-owned Belmond to begin the certification process for all of its properties. This will cover not only Belmond’s global hotels but also its restaurants, cruise ships and trains, including the iconic Orient Express train.
“From our perspective, we particularly love working with companies with such rich histories, and this is an amazing company with some of the most glorious properties across the world,” says EarthCheck’s CEO and founder, Stewart Moore. “But probably what’s most exciting is that it’s not just about hotels. When we start working with the trains, the restaurants, and the boats, I think it will start to bring in a whole new range of discussions.”
EarthCheck already works with over 550 hotels globally on their sustainability efforts, a third of which are luxury properties and includes some of the world’s most well-known brands.
The Langham Group has been working with EarthCheck for over a decade, and between 2011 and 2019 cut its energy and carbon intensity by a third, while still expanding its property portfolio.
Kempinski Hotels has had 28 of its properties certified with EarthCheck for a number of years and is currently in the process of certifying another 36. Across the 28 already certified, Kempinski claims to have saved almost 27,000 tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of taking 9,000 cars off the road, and saved almost 500 million liters of drinking water.
Moore hopes that as luxury brands like Belmond are open and transparent about their sustainability commitments, it will encourage others to do the same.
“This starts opening up a discussion with a new market because people are looking to see who’s doing what,” says Moore. “LVMH actually have extremely rich science, and are very deep in terms of their governance, they’re doing amazing stuff.”
