Here at Wanaka Hotel, we believe that sustainable tourism is about embracing a holistic change in the way we run our business. In working towards and achieving the Qualmark Silver Sustainable Tourism Business Award, we have solidified our values and practices around sustainability with initiatives such as chemical and plastic free and staff well-being programmes.
Here’s what we’ve introduced.
Chemical Free
Over a year ago, we went chemical free and we love it. Our goal was to be kind to the environment and kind to our staff, and we have been pleasantly surprised by how easy and effective this has been to do.
A recent report by Consumer NZ confirmed that water alone cleans just as effectively as most cleaning products. We also have a secret weapon: microfibre cleaning cloths! The cloths use microfibres to remove bacteria effectively. We ran tests and the lab results revealed the micro-cloths produced better results than chemical cleaning. We continue to gain high guest satisfaction for cleanliness and our staff are happy to not be working with chemicals day-in, day-out.
Goodbye Single-Use Plastics
We took some time to think about what we could do without, and how we could do better with the items we could not cope without. Over a year ago we said goodbye to plastic bags; this means no unnecessary bin liners or rubbish sacks. This one turned out to be easy and we have not looked back.
Ever thought about what happens to all those little toiletry bottles? We thought long and hard about our guest’s toiletries and we tried some different things. We tried using large refillable containers but this was not as effective as we wanted. So, we looked into other ways to reuse the small bottles and we found Beyond Skin Deep.
Now we turn our small plastic items into fence posts!
We not only reduce our landfill waste but we also give the material a second life as fence posts for farms and wineries. These fence posts are high quality and last a long time. We can toast to that!
Good Company
Here at the Wanaka Hotel we are a tight-knit team. Collectively we have worked here for over 250 years. We take care of one another and we have some cool initiatives in place to keep us safe and well.
We have been working with The Physio Room here in Wanaka. They have run some customised sessions for our team to ensure the correct movements while lifting, cleaning and moving furniture. We also did a core class, which helped us find some new muscles, and they change things up for us each session to keep it interesting.
