Cyprianerhof: CEO Martin Damian wants to check all projects for sustainability

Mr. Damian, can hoteliers still practice their profession without reconciling sustainability and profitability?

Martin Damian: No. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do something now. Otherwise, people are the ones who suffer. When we’re gone, it might take nature a million or ten million years to regenerate. But she makes time when we’re gone. So we have to start and make a mark. For example, it also makes sense that Germany does not use nuclear power.

Why? This is hotly debated and controversial because neighboring countries continue to rely on nuclear power.

Damien: I’m an advocate of “scarcity creates responsibility”. Procedures are accelerated and power lines are no longer blocked. Europe must complete the transformation to renewable energy so that we can benefit from it in ten years. But it takes time for success to become visible, so we have to tackle it together quickly and drastically rethink it.

When we all have to tighten our belts, one can also ask whether a 5-star hiking and wellness hotel like the Cyprianerhof is needed. You could also save energy here by doing without wellness.

Damien: Prosperity is not the same as waste. It’s all about checking all projects for sustainability. And we have been doing this for many years, which has also enabled us to adapt our development steps.

A well-known hotelier near Meran once told me that there is an annual arms race worth millions of euros to always offer guests something new.

Damien: This can’t be the future. We go a different way and are convinced that our guests will also appreciate it.

What are you doing?

Damien: Let’s stay with our wellness area. We look at whether a project makes social, ecological and economic sense. For example, we wanted to build a second swimming pool that is larger than the first. As a result, we naturally emit more CO2, which we then compensate as much as possible. After our analysis, we decided on an alternative: no second pool, just an enlargement of the first.

It’s probably cheaper too.

Damien: No, it’s not. The construction costs are identical to when we build a second swimming pool. But we have the promise that the new plant will use less energy and water than the previous one, even though it is larger. With our sauna area, too, we claim that quality is important, but in a 5-star establishment, luxury doesn’t have to mean waste.

What do you mean?

Damien: We had considered building two more saunas. But our customers are more than satisfied with the current sauna landscape – why should we participate in the general arms race?

What is the goal with your hotel?

Damien: We want to become a Passive House Plus, i.e. generate more energy than we consume.

The entire measures for this are probably relatively expensive.

Damien: It is a mistake to only look at returns. It is not without reason that my son wrote his thesis on “Successful without growth”. We have to radically rethink.

However, I believe that a 5-star hotel has more opportunities to do this than a 3 or 4-star hotel, which has lower margins.

Damien: Even if that’s true, it’s secondary to us. We must do and invest more for climate protection. And I’ve learned over the past few years that profitability calculations worked out faster than originally thought. 80 percent of the time, sustainability is even the cheaper option.

A surprising opinion. Do you have any examples?

Damien: Let’s take our heating system. In the year 2000 we considered whether we should take a new oil boiler or a wood chip system. At that time we still had the lira, so the oil boiler would have cost 30 million, the wood chips 240 million, eight times as much. We did it anyway because of the CO2 idea and calculated that it would pay for itself in five years. In the end there were only three.

Heating with wood is also being discussed because of the CO2 balance.

Damien: We’ve made some progress with our planning, that was an example from the year 2000. We’re now working on a heat pump that digs 160 meters deep into the ground. We already have that at home, but that will also happen in the hotel. We have one more for that
photovoltaic system
on the roof.

Certainly makes sense given the electricity costs.

Damien: They are still immensely high. Here is a calculation of how this has changed: In August 2021 we had 30,000 euros in electricity costs and a year later in August around 100,000 euros – although our consumption had even reduced somewhat. We now get 30 percent of our electricity from solar energy.

At least you don’t have to worry about the water, a source is not far away.

Damien: But here, too, it makes sense to save water because the wastewater costs have increased significantly. I can’t emphasize it often enough: We all have to realign ourselves and it shows that it is also financially worthwhile.

You can also save CO2 if you promote regional references to food. You do that?

Damien: We have to be honest: a house with our standards cannot be built without bananas or pineapples, which we import. But we can make sure that there is a “Fair Trade” seal. As part of our common good balance sheet, we began in 2014 to motivate farmers to grow vegetables for us.

Was that difficult?

Damien: Vegetables are more risky for farmers than milk production, so we as buyers have to win trust. In 2014, it wasn’t easy to find someone willing to do it. It only happened because of a favorable circumstance. But here, too, we have to get away from the monoculture, as with wheat, and also revive old varieties. Do you actually know what we also call the carrot?

carrot probably.

Damien: And yellow turnip too. What color is a carrot?

Orange.

Damien: Exactly, that’s what almost everyone says these days. But how did the color come about? Because the Dutch introduced the orange carrot. It looked great and everyone wanted it. There are many other varieties with different ingredients and flavors. Only the white or black turnips have now completely disappeared.

And we need to go back to more diversity?

Damien: This is very important: Our society has forgotten diversity, we have to go back to that. In order to be successful, we have to go back to nature and live in harmony with it – otherwise it will come to an end that none of us want.

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