Chen Xiaochun

654789759@qq.com

MARRIOTT International is pulling out all the stops to reduce the impact of its operations on the environment, president of Marriott International China Henry Lee told the Shenzhen Daily during an exclusive interview Dec. 8.

That same day, the luxurious hospitality brand held a launch ceremony to mark the start of a strategic cooperation with BMW on low-carbon travel at Edition Hotel in Sanya, Hainan Province. The two esteemed companies will deploy 100 new energy vehicles (NEV) on the island covering the 21 Marriott hotels there by February next year.

“It all started around 2016. We spoke with BMW and found that we both are very focused on environmental protection while also looking toward the future. Our core values are very similar, too,” said Lee.

In 2018, the two jointly launched the first phase of the NEV program, bringing the BMW i3 series to nine JW Marriott hotels in six cities on the Chinese mainland. Now, the project in Hainan marks the third phase of the program.

By 2030, China will ban the sale of gasoline-fuelled automobiles to become an international leader in clean energy vehicles, according to Lee.

“China has been launching a lot of programs to protect the environment: Green travel, green energy and so on. So now we look to Hainan. Hainan is what we call ‘the oriental Hawaii,’ and we think this is the perfect place for us to launch this program,” said Lee.

The 100 vehicles in Hainan will be the BMW 530Le plug-in hybrid, which is primarily powered by electricity with gasoline as a backup. As part of the program, more than 40 charging stations will be installed at Marriott hotels, available free-of-charge to all BMW NEV drivers.

Currently the group has 23 hotels covering eight bays on Hainan and another 17 in the pipeline. “By 2023, we expect to have over 40 hotels in Hainan. There are 68 different bays in Hainan, but only 14 of them are in use, and we cover eight of those already. So our coverage is huge and we are one of the biggest operators here.”

Tourists to Hainan tend to travel between different accommodations on the island rather than staying a single hotel. In response to this, Marriott plans to present bay-to-bay packages in which travelers can drive between destinations in the NEVs.

Apart from the NEV partnership with BMW, the hospitality group has launched a series of other programs aiming to achieve their aggressive goals on environmental protection as well as a social impact service platform called Serve 360. “By 2025, we are trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent, food waste by 50 percent, water usage by 15 percent and overall waste by 45 percent compared to the 2016 level globally.”

In 2019, the group eliminated the use of plastic straws in all its hotels. “Those straws can last some 150 years. Through that program alone, we reduced one billion wasted plastic straws among all our 7,200 hotels globally per year.”

By December 2020, most of the hotels under the group will also stop using small plastic bottles for guest amenities like shampoo, conditioner and bath gel and turn to larger, refillable bottles instead.

According to Lee, all the hotels under Marriott International have established a “green committee” which gathers engineers, housekeeping staff and executive members to further discuss potential ways to better protect the environment. They are also working with property owners to upgrade equipment and systems to further reduce pollution.