Álvaro Carrillo de Albornoz, General Director of the Instituto Tecnológico Hotelero (ITH)

The Instituto Tecnológico Hotelero (ITH) is an innovation centre for the hotel and tourist industry whose mission is to improve the sector’s competence by means of innovation and technology. Its General Director, Álvaro Carrillo de Albornoz, will be at the HIWC’s first round table within the track “The new paths to hotel efficiency and profitability”. He will also moderate the Parallel Session IV of this track, titled “Financing sustainability by saving”.

What traits in hotel management are more susceptible to be improved in terms of their repercussion in the businesses’ efficiency?

Tourism, and specially the hotel industry, uses energy intensively; in fact, a very important part of the energy expenses in a hotel includes the consumption associated to air conditioned and air coolers, sanitary hot water and lighting. The key is to know what the first steps are that a hotel must take in order to reduce these costs (the second most important after staffing): to be more efficient we need to know how much we consume and how we do it, in order to take the right measures.

Sustainability is one of the main challenges of the industry. How can a hotel establishment be more sustainable?

Spanish hotels can do different things in order to improve their energy efficiency and sustainability levels. In this sense, from the ITH we are working on a global action plan, the Sustainable Hotel Program, which we have started in our Sustainability and Energetic Efficiency Area. This program wants to integrate a series of technologies and equipments, which applied to a hotel, will achieve better levels in energetic efficiency and will reduce its impact to the environment.

This integral project involves developing pilot projects in different and complementary areas, such as external and internal lighting; thermal enveloping; efficient air conditioning with coolers, micro-cogeneration and heat pump (conventional and geothermal); efficient circulation pumps; bio-mass produced energy to sell; and intelligent glazing, amongst many others; and its right promotion in the hotel and tourist industry, which is vital in order to understand not only its practical reach, but also its value as a sales pitch, brand differentiation factor and as a base to build a reputation that will result in more clients and more revenues.

Where is Spain in terms of hotel efficiency? In your opinion, what are the main challenges for the industry?

The Spanish hotel sector has improved a lot in terms of energetic efficiency, but there is still a lot of work to do. Another step towards sustainability needs to be taken, as well as to introduce standardized procedures and to measure the advances in energetic efficiency and incorporate best practices that help to reduce the environmental impact associated with tourist activities.

The objective is to be ready for a short term future where sustainability will not be an option but an obligation. And, in this process, to serve a tourist that demands sustainable and environmentally friendly lodgings. To this end, we need to make the hoteliers aware of the positive effects of sustainability, as well as of its return on investment, especially in areas like Marketing and Branding. The truth is that being sustainable is not enough, you also have to communicate it; that’s why the biggest challenge is to make sustainability policies more visible, to identify them clearly for the demand, explaining not only the factors that make them efficient lodgings, but also that sustainability does not mean higher rates nor lower comfort levels.