Oct 4, 2021
Native Cabins: toward a new model of sustainable hospitality
Native puts beautiful sustainable timber cabins in remote natural locations, offering guests luxurious experiences focused on nature, adventure, and wellbeing.
We are mindful that hospitality, like all sectors of our global economy, needs alternative sustainable models if we are to avoid a climate disaster. In fact, we need to go beyond goals of banning single-use plastics or reaching net zero carbon in three decades. Can we imagine a model where holidays have a positive ecological impact?
Globally, there are fantastic examples of sustainable hospitality models, like the amazing @ShintamaniWild Hotel in Cambodia, which is part of the Bensley Collection. The light-footed resort was set up as a means to finance the conservation of rainforest in Cardamon National park. This stunningly beautiful luxury hospitality offering funds the Wildlife Alliance, an organisation that polices the protected Cardamon Forest against wildlife poachers. They also retrain former poachers or illegal tree-cutters to work in other sectors, and employs on-site naturalists to manage the protected landscape. They have a clear, measurable, and tangible positive environmental impact.
At Native, we have a simple motto: ‘You stay in cabins, we plant native trees’.
Native pledges 20% of profits to rewilding through our very own Native Environmental Programme. The Programme is overseen by a number of ecologists and experts to fund local environmental groups and activities such as planting native trees, enhancing local biodiversity, protecting and managing endangered landscapes, and tackling local environmental issues. For example, in West Cork and Kerry (Ireland), there is a problem with Rhododendron ponticum and Prunis laurocerasus (Cherry laurel), both highly invasive species that threaten local ecology and are extremely difficult and expensive to eradicate, requiring specialist treatment. There are also endangered species, such as the protected Killarney fern threatened by loss of habitat, which have a greater fighting chance of surviving and thriving in a more natural and biodiverse environment. Longer term, Native aspires to purchase land to rewild and plant native trees, much like the highly successful and exemplary sustainable brand patagonia.
The future requires ambition, and luckily there are lots of examples to draw from thanks to pioneers who have put conservation and ecology at the heart of their brand and what they do.
