Phuket luxury resort and spa, Banyan Tree Phuket, Thailand
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
In 2011 Banyan Tree Phuket was awarded the prestigious honour of Overall Winner and Best Large Hotel in the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s Green UK Travel Awards. Offering an impressive scale and range of achievement in both environmental conservation and community engagement, Banyan Tree Phuket impressed Justin Francis, managing director of responsibletravel.com and organiser of the Awards, and provides a great example of responsible tourism in Thailand going forward.
As a socially responsible business, Banyan Tree was founded with the core value of driving sustainable development. With the call to arms of embracing the environment and empowering the people, we seek to continue being an agent of social and economic development through responsible tourism. Our triple bottom line (economy, society and environment) help direct our sustainable development by inspiring associates, guests, and partners to take a wider consideration encompassing a long term view when making business decisions.
Since its founding, Banyan Tree has sought to protect the natural environment. The importance of safeguarding the environment is central within our goal of sharing the original beauty of any location with guests and friends. This includes ensuring each resort fits into the local setting in a sensitive, meaningful manner.
Opened in 1994, Banyan Tree Phuket is the company’s flagship property, located within the integrated resort complex of Laguna Phuket, at Bang Tao Bay. Comprising 135 villas, they were designed to blend with the surroundings. From within the villas and all around them, our guests are keenly aware of the sights, sounds and smells of nature, from the swaying palms and dawn chorus to the sweet floral scent. An abandoned tin mine site labelled as toxic by the UNDP and Tourism Authority of Thailand in the late 1970’s, Bang Tao Bay has been rehabilitated into what is today not only a lush tropical garden supporting not only a thriving ecosystem of wildlife, but also a community thriving from the jobs and tourism income. This location is a truly unique demonstration of the social development and environmental remediation potential of the tourism industry.
Banyan Tree increased its commitment to tackle the issues of climate change by launching Greening Communities in 2007. Banyan Tree’s group wide environmental initiative targeting climate change, Greening Communities challenges our resorts to plant 2,000 new trees per year for the next 10 years. While the initiative will offset a small amount of the globally produced atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main goal is to drive greater awareness of climate change among our communities, associates, and guests. We started with 7 initial locations in Thailand (Phuket and Bangkok), Indonesia (Bintan), Maldives, Seychelles, China (Lijiang), and Australia (Cairns) in 2007 and will continue ramping up in the coming years. Resorts were tasked to plant non invasive species on protected locations such as schools or parks where any newly planted trees have a significantly high likelihood of long term longevity. In Phuket we planted a mixture of 2800 Pine and Mangrove trees between April and September 2007.
In 2007, Banyan Tree launched a group wide effort to monitor and systematically reduce the carbon emissions from its resorts. While much of this effort was more internally focused to fine tune and enhance the overall environmental management strategy, this effort has lead to a programme launching in 2008 to reduce energy and water consumption by each resort while enhancing waste management practices at each location. The overall goal is to reduce consumption and carbon emissions by 10% every year from 2006 levels between 2008 and 2010.
Formalised in the last part of 2007, the group environmental management strategy requires each resort to have environmental management officers specifically to monitor power consumption, water consumption and waste production and reduce consumption by at least 10% every year.
Community
With the mandate of empowering people, Banyan Tree is quick to recognise the necessity of building community capacity, in every location that we are in. As an agent of social and economic development, we realise the potential of tourism to hire from the local workforce, giving training and marketable skills to raise the overall level of community prosperity.
Sustaining village development, preserving and promoting traditional cultures and crafts are part of Banyan Tree Gallery’s business ethos as a socially responsible tourism retailer. Committed to showcasing and supporting community-friendly and eco-friendly products and projects, we have cultivated a wide network of over 40 village producers and project partners around the region.
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