How Sustainable Hospitality Practices Can Boost Your Business Profits

You are listening to the Boostly podcast. We help hosts all over the world discover the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, have the confidence to go out there and get some more direct bookings. Today you're going to discover how eco friendly changes can support your bottom line and ultimately where to start with it all. And let me introduce to you a very special guest indeed, someone who I've been looking forward to speaking to, who I've listened to many times. Today we have Bob Garner joining us and I'm really excited, as I say, he, if you don't know who he is, he's a thought leader on environmental issues. He's the coordinator of Tourism Declares Climate Emergency. He's the founder of Green VR Events. He's a short term rental host who owns a short term rental with sustainability at its core. It's called Castel Der Fiki. Did I pronounce that right, Bob?

Not bad, not bad.

Okay, not bad. And he's also environmental, which is a one stop shop for, for short term rental operators interested in sustainability. So we're going to be talking a lot about sustainability today and all the things that you can do as a host which is going to help you and your guests at the end of the day. So thank you and welcome along, Bob. Great.

Thank you very much, Liam. It's great to be here. Lovely to talk to you.

So first of all, Bob, I know I've given you a bit of an introduction but if you can just add to that, just anything you'd like to mention and to also add to the end of that, why you do what you do.

Yeah. So we run Casaldi Ficci, myself and my husband, we live in Italy. We moved from London 18 years ago and bought a derelict farmhouse in rural Le Marche in Italy and converted it into self contained luxury eco friendly holiday apartments. And at the time, 18 years ago, we didn't know really much about environmental issues in relation to short term rentals, but we knew we wanted to do something. And essentially what we've done over these years is just build up our expertise and our knowledge about what works in short term rentals around sustainability. Some things work, some things don't. How you communicate with your guests, what the touch points that most interest them, how you can make money by being environmentally sustainable. And we've put all that in place and honed it and fine tuned it over the years and got to the point where we have a really deep understanding now about sustainability and short term rentals. And obviously I've gone on then to do other things with green VR events, which you can talk about, and environmental, both of which are about bringing sustainability to our industry and helping different people in our industry to be sustainable, to make money out of sustainability and to do the right thing for the industry. Because as an industry, we're part of tourism, which accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gases. Everyone knows about the climate emergency. We don't need to go into the details here, but our industry has a role to play. We are responsible for some of those emissions and then we need to start thinking how we're going to get those emissions down. So one of the key targets that people don't hear about a great deal in any industry is that everybody, every industry, every business, everybody in the world, we need to bring our emissions down by 50%, 5%, grow 50% by 2030, so that we can stay on track to reach the targets at 2050 that many people have heard about. So without going into the technicalities, what that means is most short term rental businesses are not really yet doing anything around sustainability. They're not even probably aware of that target. So what we've got to do is get people talking about that target, understanding that target, understanding their emissions, and then starting to see how they can bring their emissions down while at the same time growing their business and attracting new customers. Because at the end of the day, we've got to still be successful businesses. So, you know, that's what we've put into place in the last 18 years. And that's what I preach and talk about and try and persuade and control people to get involved in because it's the right thing to do for them, it's the right thing to do for their customers, and it's the right thing to do for the planet.

I absolutely love that. How do eco friendly practices really help short term rental owners? What, how does it make a difference to their bottom line?

Well, it makes a difference in a number of ways. You know, first of all, you can save some money on certain initiatives. So the actual fact of taking some eco steps will save you money. And that might be because it reduces your costs or it might be that you get, and I know it's something dear to your heart. And on this podcast, you get a lot more direct bookings and when you get a lot more direct bookings, then it reduces the commissions that you need to pay to the OTAs, it increases your return on investment and makes you more successful. Have people coming back and you get really much better quality reviews. So, for instance, here we are at Casaldi Fici here in Italy we have a 90% book direct rate, we have a 65% return rate and we get referrals on top of that. And we've built that around sustainability and obviously great customer service. The two must go hand in hand. But when you can build a business like that, you attract guests who are looking for those sorts of stays. Guests come and they're they attracted to the fact that you're doing the right thing for the environment and they're playing their part and I can talk about what that actually means in a moment. And they go home more satisfied and happier that they've had a great holiday, but they've also done it more environmentally friendly and that they've played a part in that. And then that casts over into reviews as well, because they're more likely to give you a review, they're more likely to give you a better review and they're more likely to give you a more nuanced review, which talks about the depth of the customer experience and what you're trying to do in giving back to the planet, giving back to the community, doing the right thing. And what's really interesting is that, you know, all you're really doing at the end of the day is you're aligning your business values and the way you run your business with the values of the customers who are looking to stay with you. And that's when you hit the sweet spot, when you get people who come and stay with you and they're thinking, well, this is great. You know, Bob has the same ideas that I have. He wants to do the same things I want to do. He's got those principles. I'm feeling really comfortable here. This is a great place to stay. I want to come back, I want to recommend it to my friends. And this is all part of the rationale around being sustainable, is attracting yourself being attractive to those customers who want to stay sustainably. Because what we're seeing in the data that comes out from booking.com and Expedia is that around 80% of consumers who are surveyed would like to stay sustainably in their next short term rental. That doesn't mean that they will, but they would like to do that. And even if it was only 50% of that, if it was only 40% of people looking to stay sustainably, that is a huge demographic out there. And what I'm always saying to people and what we've learned is by building some sustainability practices into your business, branding yourself for sustainable, and that's really important, you need to brand yourself, you need to blog about it. You need a page on your website. You need to let people know that you're out there and that they can find you without greenwashing. That's really important too. And then you can attract those customers. But to come back to your original question, what you need to be doing is I think first doing some of the low hanging fruit, doing some of the easy, quick wins that you can do without spending any money, but that you can start to pivot your organization to being greener and genuinely greener and talking to the consumer about what you're doing and also being really, really honest. At the end of the day, you know, you put on a page on your website, you say, we've done X, Y and Z and next year we're going to do A, B and C. Nobody's going to criticize for that. Nobody's expecting you to be perfect from day one. What they're looking for is that you've taken some serious steps and that you have some genuine intention that comes from the heart, that you're going to take it further and you're going to do more and people will be really pleased with that. You don't need to greenwash, you don't need to exaggerate it, you don't need to pretend it's any more than it is. We're all on a journey and everybody understands that some of us are further ahead than others. But it's never too late to engage with this topic and start to think about what you can do. And that's why, you know, I talk all the time about do it for the right business reasons as well as doing it for the planet and doing it for the customers, do it for yourself because you can be more successful.

Thank you so much for spending your time with us today, Bob. And thank you to if you're listening to this on the Boostly podcast, we know there's a lot of places you can put your attention. We really appreciate you putting it with us. So thanks again, Bob. And yeah, we'll see you on the next one.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loose.