Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Ron: So the operational side of the business as COO, you’re always looking at every component, what’s coming in, what’s going out, what’s wearing down, what needs to be replaced, what could be refurbished, what might be installed. It always has an environmental impact.

Dominik : What we’ve done already for the last ten years, we’ve had a system where we can’t be carbon neutral, but we can offset, and that we’ve done ourselves with the help of our guests, having quite a few initiatives that can help dead areas of land somewhere in the world, not necessarily in Mauritius, but also obviously looking at ways of how we can reduce the impact that we have in our hotels, whether we install this massive floating solar platform that you see,  if it’s a sunny day in the middle of the day, it supports all of the rooms, not all the hotels, but all of the villas are fully powered by solar.

Now, here we are getting to the point and we’re getting very close to having a new wind power not with turbines, but with kites that are being explored. Where we were working with Gunter Pauli who I’m sure you’ve heard of, to bring that energy source here, obviously we want to use it in our hotels, but it might go as far as maybe powering the entire island of Rodrigues with wind, with constant wind power,  because solar, obviously it’s not all the time. So where we can, we want to reduce and obviously the standard things of reducing water consumptions in the hotels and trying where we can recycle. That is an important part. and we’ve gone as far to really say we want to strive to zero food waste. 

So it’s important to get the best food for our guests. But in a hotel operation, you know, you don’t utilize everything and the past, unfortunately, a lot of it has gone  the easy way where it’s just being discarded. But now we started at LUX* Le Morne and really made sure, what can we do with the food. Work with a supplier that brings the food to us and put it upon them, say, “Well, you’re leaving with an empty truck. We’re going to give you used food and you bring it to shelters, you bring it to schools or maybe to pig farms.” So depending on what food waste we have, it will be utilized again. So all of these things, we keep learning what we can do to care more because a lot of things we simply don’t know. And somebody reminds us of the next.

Ron: As we learn these things and we try these things and we find out how to actually make these things work, the team members themselves are seeing all of this happen. 

Dominik: What they see happens, in many ways they are driving forces in making it happen because many of us, we are guests on the island. We don’t know everything, but they will know  “Here’s a contact you need to talk to. Here’s a small community. Here’s an NGO” that may not have the big PR power for us to find them normally but it’s all these, right? 

Ron: Someone who works on our property has a brother who has a wife who’s part of that NGO, and it connects into the community almost like a root, growing up more deeply and feeding the ground.

Dominik: It makes it more powerful because it’s not something that’s dictated, but they wanted to make it happen. 

Ron: So this whole evolution to shining service was about shining for our guests, whereas caring about what matters. Caring is something that has involved all of us- guests, team members, ourselves, our families, everybody else in the community, and this is just one example and what we’re talking about, about how it flows this way, but it also flows out that way.

Dominik: Today we see that unless you care for your team members, they will go somewhere else.

Ron: When you do care for your team members, especially in challenging times, they absolutely want to come back and help make you succeed. 

Dominik: Without that component, we would struggle in our hotel because there is a shortage of people wanting to work in the hotel industry in Mauritius, and I think it’s across the world. So obviously I, as somebody looking for a job, I go where I’m treated best, where I will feel that I am an important part of an organization. 

Ron: I’m actually cared about, and cared for. Yeah. Yeah. Demonstrated beautifully here.