Pure Blue Foundation and Aleenta green hotels, Thailand
Anchalika Kijkanakorn and her sustainable hotels around Thailand
Welcome to episode 81 of the Green Healthy Places Podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in the built environment.
I’m your host Matt Morley and in this episode I’m in Bangkok, talking to Anchalika Kijkanakorn, Founder and Managing Director of Akaryn Hotel Group, a boutique hospitality business of green hotels she created in 2008 that built on the success of the Aleenta Resort & Spa she had launched five years before that.
Anchalika is also Founder of the Pure Blue Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to protecting and preserving the planet’s marine ecosystems and promoting eco friendly initiatives in the surrounding environment near her resort properties.
We cover the relationship between the tourism industry and green initiatives in Thailand more generally as well as the specifics of her activities under the umbrella of the Pure Blue Foundation in her home country, for example in relation to food waste and organic food production from her restaurant operations.
Eco hotels in Thailand
So, my name is Anchalika and I'm the founder and managing director of Akaryn Hotel Group and within the group we have the Aleenta Resort and Spa, our eco friendly hotels; as well as Ayurah wellness.
Aleenta is a brand of luxury boutique eco friendly hotels. We have three properties now in Thailand, one in Chiang Mai, one in Phuket Phang Nga, and one in Hua Hin area.
Aleenta is almost like a hidden piece of paradise, usually located a little bit out of the way because personally, I don't like to be surrounded by a lot of people when I'm on vacation.
Akaryn Hotel Group is the overall operating and managing management company of all of the hotels within the group.
We then have another brand, which is called the Akira, a little bit more of a quirky city center hotel. We currently have one in Chiang Mai in the city center with a rooftop bar and a very busy restaurant on the ground floor.
Ayurah Wellness is a wellness brand that we've created almost like an extension of our spa but I wanted to kind of carve it out to be it's on its own because there's a lot of work going into it, lots of different wellness retreats for mind and body. All our green hotels have an Ayurah wellness concept inside them.
For example, Aleenta Retreat Chiang Mai, because it's next to one of the most famous temples in Thailand, known for Meditation and Vipassana, so we do different levels of Vipassana and meditation retreat there.
Aleenta Phuket Resort & Spa
Pure Blue Foundation as an umbrella organization for Akaryn eco friendly hotels
As soon as I launched the hotel, I also founded the Pure Blue Foundation to make sure that wherever I go to make a living, create an eco hotel business, I am part of the solution and not the one that comes to destroy the beautiful places that I've discovered.
I want to preserve the land not destroy it with the effects of tourism.
In the beginning it was really about marine conservation rather than sustainable travel, or other environmentally conscious projects.
We have had a coral reef restoration project for example as well as work with local schools to educate young children on how eco friendly hotels can protect the environment.
Removing single use plastic from green hotels
Personally I don't like single-use plastic and so all of our hotels have become single-use plastic free since 2018. I don't want to demonize all plastic.
It's not that you can't use everything, but it's just that you can't you shouldn't just use it once and throw it away.
I never had these little bottles of shampoos in our hotels. We just have always used beautiful ceramic handmade bottles and we refill them.
The first 80% of this shift internally is not that difficult. It's really low hanging fruit. It's the last 10-20% that is really difficult.
When you when you buy things from suppliers and it comes in these three layers of plastic you have to work with your suppliers to find a different way to get around that.
Endangered animal protection as part of an environmentally friendly resort plan
We're doing a rescued animal protection area in the north of Thailand as we're close to jungles where a lot of poachers try to capture rare animals and re-sell them.
From time to time the Thai police catch them and we help to rehabilitate the animals before they return to the jungle.
So we're working with the the forestry department to support them in their work. We are also creating an animal watching platform for guests so we can see all these animals coming out at night.
We've got some deers, as well as monkeys with no ears!
Aleenta Resorts Hotels Thailand
Green hotel certifications vs a holistic approach to reducing environmental impact
We've been doing it out organically. When we started creating our green hotels there was no guideline to follow. Even the green hotel certifications change over time, like a moving target.
In Thailand there is one eco hotel certification called Green Lead, we did that.
Then with Small Luxury Hotels (SLH) we're part of the Considerate Collection. We pretty much have everything we need as eco friendly hotels. We're also working on Traveline certification now.
Reducing a green hotels carbon footprint with green technology and renewable energy
During the last five years, we've been turning more and more toward renewable energy, now more than 25% of our energy at the resort comes from our renewable sources on-site, I mean solar panels.
Thailand is full of sunshine and electricity is very expensive, so it make sense for us to put panels on any rooftop we can!
The relationship between green hotels guests and eco friendly initiatives
I don't think that anybody make a decision to stay in a hotel, whether or not this particular hotel is certified or not; nowadays everybody at a certain level of luxury, just assumes that you're doing it. Like a basic requirement.
If I don't preserve and protect the environment where i'm where I make a living, I will not be able to make a living there for a long time. So this is why I'm doing it. and And this is what I'm telling the community around me.
If you don't look after the beach, if you don't clean it, if you continue to throw things into the sea, how long do you think people are gonna come and spend their holidays here in our green hotels?
Top down implementation of sustainability in the Thai hospitality industry
I actually am really happy to see that there's some movement from the government level to actually close down some of the beaches because of over-tourism.
For example, Phi Phi Island was closed for a while and in the marina reserve they had to let the reef recover for a while.
Food waste, seasonal produce and reducing the environmental impact of hotel kitchens
Yeah, so the kitchen.. the thing is, we're such a small hotel, we have from 20 rooms up to 66 rooms. So we're very different to a 300-room property. Those are the kind of hotels that will create a lot of food waste because they do big buffets.
Well, we don't do buffets! Everything is a' la carte, cooked to order. We're not an industrial size hotel.
The second thing is with the cooking oil, we signed an MOU with a Thai start-up to collect all of our cooking oil and they're turning it into jet fuel.
Then we have a small organic farm in all of our hotels and in one hotel in particular, we even have a chicken coop, guests love riding a bicycle to the chicken coops to collect their own eggs for breakfast in the morning.
In the future, we are looking to open green hotels in Bali, we've been working on that one since before COVID, another in Chiang Mai and also a property in Pattaya, so stay tuned for more news on our expanding collection of eco friendly hotels.