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073: Hotel wellness & sustainability with Alejandro Leo
252 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to episode 073 of the Green Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today. I’m your host, Matt Morley and today I’m in the Caribbean talking to Alejandro Leo, a hotel wellness, spa and sustainability expert.
Alejandro is a hotel wellness professional working for luxury resorts like the Oetker Collection’s Jumby Bay Island Resort in Antigua where he managed the spa and sustainability program.
Prior to that he was Global Head of Wellness for HABITAS, an innovative new hotel group, and previously worked for Azulik in Tulum, Mexico as well as stints at brands such as Six Senses, Belmond and Rosewood.
- ALEC Wellness Consulting (LinkedIn)
- Alejandro Leo (LinkedIn)
- Oetker Collection, Jumby Bay Island
- Habitas Hotels
- Azulik, Mexico
- Six Senses Resorts
- Green Healthy Places
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 73 of the Green Healthy Places Podcast, in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today. I'm your host, Matt Morley, and I'm now in the Caribbean, talking to Alejandro Leo.
00:00:30
Speaker
a hotel wellness spa and all-round sustainability expert. He's a hotel wellness professional.
Career Highlights and Past Experiences
00:00:37
Speaker
He's been working for luxury resorts like Urke Collection's Jambi Bay Island Resort in Antigua where he managed the spa and sustainability program. Prior to that he was global head of wellness for Habitas
00:00:49
Speaker
probably one of the most innovative and interesting hotel groups out there right now. If you haven't discovered them yet, we'll add a link to that website in the show notes. He also previously worked for Azulique in Tulum in Mexico, which is truly one of the world's most interesting and inspiring projects. Again, we'll add the links to that. But he's also worked for some big brands like Six Senses, Belmond and Rosewood Alejandro. Thanks for joining us.
00:01:17
Speaker
Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for hosting me. Amazing to be here and sharing a little bit of what I've been doing for the last years in my life, in my career, and which also my passion.
Wellness Growth in the Caribbean
00:01:32
Speaker
Well, let's jump into it. So when you look at the current wellness, fitness and spa offering in the Caribbean, which is where you've started to develop a lot of your own personal experience.
00:01:46
Speaker
What's happening there? How are you seeing it evolve? What are the current trends? What's the feeling that you're getting from that particular region right now? Well, as hospitality industry is growing very fast around the world, but Latin America, Caribbean, it's a very fast growth in this industry.
00:02:12
Speaker
The Caribbean islands, very exclusive islands, very expensive islands, but people love to come on vacation, love to come and spend some time here. The really beauty of the beaches, the landscaping that you find here, they're stunning. And that's the reason is so popular. The culture,
00:02:39
Speaker
the landscaping, everything is very raw. So again, we're going back to the basics. People are looking for those experiences, you know, but in terms of wellness, we are not at the level, you know, the Caribbean islands, they're still not at the level from different countries, you know, from countries in the Middle East or North America or Europe.
00:03:03
Speaker
The Caribbean island is still developing a lot of projects and there are still not enough professionals in this field to fill that necessity or demand.
Developing Local Talent in Hospitality
00:03:19
Speaker
But that's exactly what is happening here. But it's a culture. It gives you a lot. But this is what we're getting here. But it's beautiful working here. The people, as I said, there's a lot of potential to develop hotels, to develop professionals. And more people are interested in becoming professionals and practitioners who are getting into wellness, fitness, yoga, and any other practices.
00:03:45
Speaker
So when you think about what's happening now and what might need to happen in the future in the coming years, do you see primarily the focus needing to be around professional development, training, education as the main issue or let's say the opportunity as well?
00:04:04
Speaker
Yes, it's development definitely is to develop more people, to develop professionals. Because as I mentioned, there's a lot of people interested in growing in this industry, hospitality and wellness industry. So I think I believe the companies, they need to start investing more in how to develop those professionals and how to
00:04:28
Speaker
educate them in how to become a wellness destination, each of the properties or even each of the islands, the governments, they need to invest in how to position their islands and the culture as a wellness destination.
00:04:48
Speaker
because you can't necessarily find. Well, presumably there must be a combination of expatriate workers who are brought in from elsewhere and a local hiring policy, right? So you've got a mix of hiring locally needing to
00:05:03
Speaker
hire more perhaps for attitude and personality than experience and then presumably there are a number of people who are brought in who have that experience but they're a minority on any overall team within the resort that's how it works when you're in a quite a remote location right you're on a small island near Antigua that's not an easy place to go hire a spa and wellness team i'm guessing.
00:05:28
Speaker
Correct. But as I mentioned, more people, more local people are interested because the people who are coming from abroad, some of us were staying, some of us were leaving. It's temporary opportunities when we come here. But there's a lot of people who's interested and now what is happening in Antigua, you can see more places opening to fitness centers and healthy restaurants.
00:05:57
Speaker
and a community of wellness people. We just had the World Wellness Weekend last September 15, 16, 17 of September. And the Antigua and Barbuda Tourism Authority, they were very involved and they were supporting the ambassadors, the initiative to promote wellness around the island. And that is very important in every single country, if every single island around the Caribbean,
00:06:24
Speaker
or in the Caribbean, invest in their people and start putting that in the people's mind and supporting the professionals, definitely they're gonna grow. And you have a lot of local people who are very interested and they
Sustainability Challenges and Innovations
00:06:39
Speaker
have to travel. They need to leave Antigua to prepare and to do certifications. And so you can see there, you can find an opportunity for the governments to bring professionals or to create careers and create
00:06:54
Speaker
that specific development and education in their local schools to create more professionals without leaving the country. And so let's imagine you're on this beautiful, remote island, wonderful beaches, palm trees.
00:07:11
Speaker
fresh fruits, fresh fish, et cetera. Clearly, nature is a big part of the experience for the guests. It's a big part of the offer and the positioning for these resorts in that particular region, right? It's all about reconnecting with nature, getting out of the city and get into this sort of beautiful picturesque location. So from there, it leads me into sustainability. So how far have these resorts
00:07:37
Speaker
adopted and embraced a strategy around sustainability. Is that happening or do you think there's, is there a gap? Is there more that you'd expect from these resorts around, for example, sustainable operations or sustainable building and development, or are you seeing that it's already happening? Well, it's happening, baby steps, but it's happening, you know, because if you see
00:08:04
Speaker
Now, the word sustainability, the words wellness are everywhere. So people, you know, it's about education, you know, it's about how we are educating our people, some people think that sustainability is, it's only about recycling, and about not using plastic, but it's more than that. It's more than that. It's an entire lifestyle. It's how we care for the environment.
00:08:30
Speaker
And by taking care or by caring about the environment, we are caring about other people. And that's when you combine the way you build hotels, the practices that you're doing, the work with the community, this support to the community. It's a change in their lifestyle and it's happening. It's happening. But again, it takes us again to
00:08:55
Speaker
education. It takes us to the enough professionals or the enough people, you know, it's a minority. But that minority can make changes and the opportunity and the positive way to see
00:09:11
Speaker
that happening around the Caribbean or on these small islands is because they're small islands and you have less people. You have the opportunity to reach more people by creating and doing practices and having more consistency in the practices the government or professionals or hotel companies are doing.
00:09:34
Speaker
And yes, it's happening and because most, some of the hotel companies that are here are corporate, they're coming from different countries or even from the Caribbean islands, but they're using and they're putting together those practices to start making the changes. That's interesting, right? Because if you've got a luxury hotel brands like the Urka Collection, for example, that have a lot of prestigious
00:10:00
Speaker
resorts around Europe like historic resorts big names ski resorts ski ski chalets in ski resort locations and then they have an island resort
00:10:13
Speaker
How far are they able to adapt their sustainability standards to such a unique context, right? Because the island is very different to something they might do in a historic resort in Europe. So did you find that the sustainability standards or the protocols were being delivered at group level or is that something that's being worked out by the individual hotel and resort? How much support is coming from the brand at that point and how much is actually just done by the local team?
00:10:43
Speaker
Well, the support from the global brand, it's full support. The standards are coming from corporate. And this is not only with Autker. This is with most of the hotel companies. You need to adapt. Depends on the location. It's the level of the number of practices that you're entitled to do or that you're capable to do. And that's where you become more sustainable because you start
00:11:13
Speaker
working in your own ways to do things and getting all the resources that you have to start making the change. Here, there's two ways, two opportunities with Jambi Bay Island. One is having all the support from the corporate office and the other is from support that you get from the homeowners. It's a private island owned by homeowners, by people who are having their vacation homes
00:11:43
Speaker
And there is a company, which is called Jumpy Bay Island Services, who's taking care of the entire island and having beautiful programs about how to take care of the reef, just recycling the plastic, crushing the glass, the compost, everything, the solar panels, creating their own water, the water treatment.
00:12:12
Speaker
by mixing and by putting together the all the efforts that Heartbreak Collection as a corporate company is putting into Jumpy Bay Island and from the homeowners things are happening. So it is
00:12:27
Speaker
And the situation, the problem that sometimes you need to, you're facing is when, you know, where are you sending the plastic? Sometimes it's difficult because you need to send it to different islands. You need to send it to mainland, to the U.S. or to Central America, to Panama. And not, you know, it's not easy to find the companies and it's not easy to find who are
00:12:51
Speaker
responsible to manage that waste. And that's what I'm saying. You become more sustainable and you're creative and start looking for how to make things happen.
00:13:06
Speaker
The principles behind sustainability are, in a sense, universal. They don't change. Waste is a problem for any hotel, no matter what location. It's then how it's applied and delivered at the local level and how you actually make
Integrating Wellness into Hospitality
00:13:20
Speaker
it happen. I think that's where you have to rely on some creativity and almost inventing a way to make it into a solution.
00:13:30
Speaker
Wellness, we can think of wellness in a similar way, whereas a lot of the facilities and the amenities that we associate with hotel wellness are more or less the same. You know what you're expecting, okay, we'll have a haman, we'll have a spa, we'll have a gym, or maybe have a running route around the island. Some things change, but often those components are similar. When you've gone to a brand or when you spent time working with a brand like Habitas,
00:13:58
Speaker
What sort of things were you doing leading the wellness there at the brand level, not just at the individual resorts, but at the brand? How were you looking to reflect the Habitas concept in what wellness offers, experiences were available to the guests? When we talk about wellness, everything is, and we know, it's a lifestyle.
00:14:25
Speaker
Wellness, it's a lifestyle. And when you're traveling and you are looking for those places, for those hotels, for those companies who are really, really creating a lifestyle for the travelers. And it's not only having a yoga shala or yoga pavilion or just having a gym.
00:14:47
Speaker
It's the entire experience. It's from arrival to departure. Since the moment you arrive into the hotel, the experience, the people, the smile, the warmth, that happiness, what the companies, what Abbott does, and any other companies are sharing, that is wellness from the beginning. And then what are the offerings? It's not that you just have, as I said, a gym or a yoga class, programming.
00:15:15
Speaker
Habitat hotels, they are very strong in programming. And how you're sharing from seven in the morning all the way until 10 p.m. when you're having concerts. So they're combining music.
00:15:28
Speaker
They're combining yoga or mindfulness activities. They're combining fitness, conversations, sustainability practices. Do they bring in professionals? So it's not that you are coming and just waiting for something to happen. They will pull you. They will tell you, you know what? We have this for you. We're going to, as I mentioned, it's education. And when you have a hotel brand educating you or sharing
00:15:56
Speaker
you know, their beliefs, you know, of their philosophy, that really makes a change in how the people are selecting a hotel brand. And that's what Albita is very strong. It's the wellness, sustainability and lifestyle, what they are suggesting and sharing to their guests is very important and it's making a difference. I like how you describe it. It's like,
00:16:22
Speaker
It was previously a small side element of the guest experience in other brands, right? Maybe you go to the gym, maybe you don't, but that's not the reason why you go to the particular resort. And this new generation of traveler where we have, you know, wellness is part of our DNA. It's part of how we live. It's our lifestyle. And it's not something you can, the same with sustainability. Once you've seen it, once you've understood,
00:16:47
Speaker
that plastic doesn't just disappear. Once you've seen the world through those green glasses, you can't unsee it. So you don't want to switch that off. And it's really something that kind of comes to define the way you experience the world. And so a brand like Habitas, it sounds like they've kind of taken the wellness and the sustainability piece maybe and put it in the center of the experience. So it's not something, an optional extra on the side. It's like the main course of the meal. And that's where the programming comes in, right?
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. That's very interesting. That's very interesting. It gives you a lot. It gives you a lot as a professional. It gives you a lot because you are not as, you know, we will go there, but it's not just like a spot person. You know, you are a wellness person. You need to be involved working with the FMV team. You need to work with the front office team. You need to get involved working in the entire
00:17:41
Speaker
hotel operation by sharing all this and bringing professionals from different parts of the world and creating the programmings and creating those experiences for guests and how you're sharing it. You grow as a person, you grow as a professional and it gives you a different perspective of life.
00:18:03
Speaker
It's fair to say that the meaning of wellness then has evolved and changed over the last few years, at least in the perspective of hotels and resorts. Have you seen a shift? Would you put it as post COVID? Perhaps it's impossible to understand the why, but we can see that something has changed, right? I don't know if you can perhaps talk to how
00:18:31
Speaker
things were before, but what you're seeing now and where you think it's going. How is wellness in resorts and hotels evolving? What is that journey that you've been part of yourself and where do you see not a destination, but the next few years? Where does it evolve from here? Well, this is very simple. Wellness is the new, let's say, hospitality concept. You cannot, not hotel brand will escape from wellness.
00:19:00
Speaker
I remember when I was, you know, a lot of years before, the wellness world was more exposed or more used, you know, where the spa, there were only massage treatment rooms and, you know, in a fitness center or beauty salon. And when you were talking about spas, people were just relating to massages. Ah, that's what they do, massages. Now, wellness.
00:19:28
Speaker
not too many people understand what is wellness, but people, some people now relate wellness to yoga. And when you really explain, and this is our job as a professionals is, is to explain properly and, and, and to share into, you know, you need to show your passion.
00:19:49
Speaker
for what you're doing. This is very important. And a quick example of how wellness is growing and how wellness is going to grow is this conversation that is happening right now, Matt. Because you and I, we got in touch and we start having conversation about how to create and develop a concept
00:20:10
Speaker
You know, a jumpy bay. And what you're doing, the conversation that we had a few minutes before, it was not only creating a gym, you know, a cube or four walls with fitness equipment inside. You need to create a concept. You need to make sure that it doesn't matter if you're in New York or London and you have a thousand square meters, but you try to create an experience for guests to come and see how nature
00:20:40
Speaker
can help you with the vertical gardens.
00:20:43
Speaker
and sustainable materials that they're using. So it will transport you to a different place. It will transport you and it will give you a different mindset and you will escape from that stress. And that's exactly what is happening in hotels. Hotels, they want guests to experience and to really, really, whenever they're going back to their places, they remember that experience of wellness or even staying at their room doing a private yoga class or having the most unique
00:21:12
Speaker
local spot treatment, you know, by embracing the culture, when again, it goes to sustainability, with supporting the local community and how you do things. And this is what makes hospitality, you know, different now, because wellness and hospitality is just the same. You are looking for that experience to change lifestyles,
00:21:36
Speaker
through better practices and sharing more of the basics in the local cultures. I recently did a report on biohacking, longevity, and let's say this new trend towards ice baths, infrared saunas,
00:22:01
Speaker
all kinds of IV drip treatments, et cetera. And in the process of researching that and looking at these new studios, these boutique biohacking studios that are opening in Los Angeles and New York and London. And just at the end, I realized that I was researching some hotels
00:22:19
Speaker
Just a few, but like four seasons, Maui and one or two others had started to pick up on this trend. And I wonder how much hotels have to keep up with the lifestyle that their guests are used to in LA, Moscow, London, Paris, New York.
00:22:40
Speaker
where these things are now part of the wellness experience. If you've got a membership at Equinox, having ice baths and infrared saunas is pretty standard by now. Everybody's doing it. And the hotels, they get left behind. The hotel spa, for me, hasn't been reinvented.
00:22:57
Speaker
Enough some brands like happy that's doing it but it's really stuck as you said it's just seems to be about massages a sauna and a hammer and the gyms often not that much better and yet the experience is that these luxury travelers are getting in their home.
00:23:15
Speaker
as in where they live, what's available to them in a big city is just so much more advanced, right? It's like, it's almost as if hotels are a little bit behind, at least the more traditional brands, they have to catch up a bit. And then you have a few of these brands who are just said, wait a minute.
00:23:31
Speaker
This is happening and I see habitats as that. They just said, this is already in the market. We just need to create a brand that starts at that level rather than starting from behind and trying to speed up.
Adapting to Trends and Education Needs
00:23:44
Speaker
Would you say that's fair from your perspective? How do you see that connection between what the hotels offer and what the guests are used to in their home cities?
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, listen, this is a very valid point. And this is something that I experienced here at Jumpy Bay, because one of the reasons why I was creating and developing all this concept at Jumpy Bay is because the spot was a little bit flat and went to check the next level. And because even the homeowners, the people coming here, they were saying, I have a better spot back in London. I have a better spot back in my neighborhood.
00:24:20
Speaker
You know, I'm saying that because, you know, what you're mentioning now, and that is very true. But this is where the companies, they need to invest in their professionals. They need to push their professional.
00:24:35
Speaker
to the wellness manager to continuously be educating themselves. And you need to create that development program for your team members. And that will take you to the next level. Because there's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of convention. There's a lot of certification that you can get. And once you try it, if you keep yourself as a spa manager, the spa is going to be flat.
00:25:01
Speaker
So you need to invest in your people and you need to push your people to go for more. You need to involve your people into wellness. That's where the wellness workplace is very important because once you start sharing that wellness to your people, to your staff, to your team members, they're going to get into that mood. They're going to get into the wellness. They're going to start falling in love with wellness and that will make the change.
00:25:27
Speaker
Same thing with sustainability. You need to share. It's about education. There's a lot of education now around the world and hospitality is suffering because of that. That is for sure.
00:25:39
Speaker
Let's look at that then. When you're implementing a sustainability plan, you may or may not have a sustainability manager, full-time, in-house, with the resort group, or rather with the local resort, maybe in the head office at the brand level, there's someone. But it can't be easy to implement that without an entire department. So do you have to create
00:26:02
Speaker
You know, kind of like a green team. Do you have like certain people from different departments? Because sustainability connects with fruit and beverage, it connects with spa and wellness, it connects with the rooms division, housekeeping. I mean, it's really cross departmental, right? It connects multiple divisions within
00:26:21
Speaker
the hotel operations. It's not one corner of one separate division. It's kind of infiltrates and connects with everything, right? So if you're managing sustainability, you have to work all the way across these departments. Correct. Yes, it's not easy. You cannot do it by yourself. That's for sure. And you need to get involved every single department. But
00:26:43
Speaker
Like you said, putting together a green team is the number one step that you need to do. And not only a green team, you need to find passion, people with a lot of passion about environment and about care for others, because that is sustainability. It's how you care for the environment, how you care for people, how you care for yourself,
00:27:10
Speaker
you know, because there's future generations or present generations, you know, who would like to know more and to, but they are looking for that there, there is hunger of how to be better, how to help the planet and how to be a better person. And, and you need to find and, and the people with the strengths and the passion for that. There's, you know,
00:27:34
Speaker
My love for sustainability and wellness, it's been growing for the past years. And working for Six Senses Hotel, it really made me fell in love with sustainability at the level that I'm at right now. When you say there's a lot of brands who are just doing a lot of initiatives about sustainability, Six Senses is already there.
00:28:03
Speaker
You know, six census I remember when I was in Thailand in 2019, it was 2018, it was the initiative of plastic zero by 2022, you know, and most of the properties. And they achieved that and they're achieving more than that. You know, and when you visit one of the six census, when you work in one of the six census is not only the spa people, the spa team who are
00:28:32
Speaker
in love with wellness and sustainability is the entire hotel, the entire property who has the DNA of six senses, which is sustainable company, wellness company, and growing and growing with that concept from around the world. So I will say that it's very important how you share that communication to your team
00:29:02
Speaker
how your brand will make your team feel like they're part of it. And that is very, very important. But yes, finding people with passion is the main secret. Yeah,
Contact and Closing Remarks
00:29:18
Speaker
I think it's a very valid point.
00:29:22
Speaker
One way is looking at it from below and up. The other is to come from the top down, which is this is just how we do things. It's part of the brand. It's part of the corporate culture. It's not about finding those four or five individuals. It's the entire company that's aligned behind one goal. That's kind of the next level. And six cents is maybe Soneva and one hotels will be the others that would be kind of at that point. But it's great to see we now have multiple brands that we can reference in that sense, which I think 10 years ago, that wasn't the case.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah. Listen, we'll add all these links in the show notes if anyone's interested in connecting with you via LinkedIn, what's the best way to connect?
00:30:02
Speaker
I'm with Alejandro Leo at LinkedIn or Alec Wellness Consulting. Both they can look and connect with me anytime and that's the way to connect with me. Sounds good. Well, listen, thanks so much for the last half hour. It's been fun. Muchas gracias.