Pictured from left to right: Narm Chadwick, Design Director, Master Planning at enCity Urban Solutions; Paul Pruangkarn, senior executive at the Pacific Asia Travel Association; Gabriel Tan, CEO of GUAVA International; Nida Wongphanlert, Managing Director of 137 Pillars Hotels & Resorts and Heidi Gallant, Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand (AMCHAM).At PHIST 2026 (Phuket Hotels for Island Sustaining Tourism 2026), leaders from Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), 137 Pillars Hotels & Resorts, AmCham Thailand and GUAVA International argued that tourism’s sustainability journey must move beyond certification and compliance and into the way businesses operate, invest, hire and create value.
For years, sustainability in tourism could be summed up by familiar gestures: changing sheets less often, separating rubbish, eliminating plastic bottles and, increasingly, putting a certification badge on the hotel website. Those measures still matter. But for a growing group of tourism leaders across Asia-Pacific, they are no longer enough. The more pragmatic question now is whether sustainability can become part of the way a business creates value — for its customers, employees, communities, shareholders and destinations — rather than being treated as an additional responsibility sitting somewhere outside the core business.
That was the message from a panel at PHIST 2026 in Phuket, titled “Sustainability Starts at the Top: How Leaders Embed Change Across Culture, Operations, and Performance.” The discussion brought together Paul Pruangkarn, Director of Marketing & Communications at PATA; Heidi Gallant, Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand (AmCham); Nida Wongphanlert, Managing Director of 137 Pillars Hotels & Resorts; and Gabriel Tan, CEO of GUAVA International and UN SDG Pioneer for Circular Economy.
Their message was clear: the future of sustainable tourism will depend less on what companies say they are doing and more on whether sustainability is embedded in how they make decisions.
Beyond the certificate
For Paul Pruangkarn, the difference between genuine sustainability and “greenwashing” is increasingly visible in what happens beyond the walls of a hotel. The organisations making the greatest impact, he said, are those that go beyond basic environmental measures and demonstrate benefits for local communities and destinations. “It’s organisations that give back to the communities, local communities,” he said.
He pointed to examples of businesses supporting local people, conservation and community-based tourism, including initiatives associated with Cambodia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's Jetwing Hotels, for example, was highlighted for integrating food production and food-waste management into its operations while recruiting from underserved communities and providing training and accommodation.
For Pruangkarn, this illustrates a fundamental point: sustainability is ultimately about people. “Whatever you do for the environment, at the end of the day is also for the people and you are working with people,” he said. Sustainability is therefore not simply about reducing today's environmental footprint, but about strengthening destinations against future pressures, including climate change and increasingly severe storms.
Start with the “why” — and make it habitual
For Nida Wongphanlert, sustainability became practical only when her team understood why they were being asked to change. Rather than setting a distant target of obtaining a major certification, 137 Pillars started with a smaller sustainability programme that allowed the team to build confidence across operations, procurement and engineering.
“If I had a target, okay, let’s get a certificate by five years, and they don’t know why they’re doing it, then I’m not getting them to work with me,” she said.
The approach has since filtered into everyday hotel operations, from procurement and packaging to waste separation and food consumption.
The hotel also looks for local and women-led suppliers where possible, while sustainability choices can also become part of the guest experience and storytelling.
The objective is to make sustainable behaviour habitual rather than exceptional.
At the staff canteen, for example, a “no waste Monday” encourages employees to take only what they intend to eat.
“It’s beyond operation. It goes to their daily life, their new habit,” Wongphanlert said.
It is a small example, but it reflects the broader challenge of embedding sustainability into organisational culture rather than leaving it as the responsibility of a dedicated sustainability team.
Sustainability needs a business case
Gabriel Tan took the argument a step further, saying sustainability will struggle to survive if it is treated simply as compliance. Boards and funders increasingly want to know what an investment delivers. “If there’s no outcome, meaning good to have, not a must have… they will either reduce the budget or number two, they will just remove it completely,” Tan said. The answer, he argued, is value creation. That could mean higher revenue or profitability, but it can also include stronger brand reputation, higher asset value and — particularly important for hospitality — the ability to attract and retain talent. Hotel and tourism businesses are highly dependent on people to deliver service, making recruitment and retention an increasingly important part of the sustainability equation. “If you cannot attract people or you cannot retain people, then you have a problem,” Tan said.
The shift is not necessarily from “profit” to “sustainability”, but towards understanding how the two can reinforce each other. For businesses, that means asking not only what sustainability initiative should we implement?, but also what value will it create, and how will we know?
The biggest challenge: alignment
Perhaps the most difficult issue is that tourism cannot solve sustainability on its own. Waste management, for instance, requires sanitation systems. Food waste involves agriculture and food supply chains. Destination resilience requires governments, communities and businesses to work together.
Pruangkarn said tourism increasingly needs to bring other sectors into the conversation. “In tourism we also need the help of other sectors to get involved in our conversation,” he said.
Tan described the problem in similar terms: resources exist, but they are often working towards different priorities and are not aligned. “The problem is the resources are not aligned,” he said. The solution, he argued, is to establish a common understanding of sustainability as value creation, giving different stakeholders a reason to collaborate rather than treating sustainability as another obligation. “It’s about making more and more people understand, hey, let’s create value together,” Tan said.
Sometimes the hardest thing is doing the easy things
For smaller hotels, Wongphanlert’s experience offers another lesson: sustainability does not always begin with the biggest possible ambition. Her hardest decision was actually to slow down, choose a programme appropriate to the size of the organisation and give her team the confidence to succeed before taking on larger goals. “The hardest decision for me was to slow down and to step back and find what was the best task for my team that could bring them forward,” she said.
Tan offered perhaps the simplest description of what comes next. “The most difficult thing is to do the easy stuff,” he said, because easy actions are also easy to ignore. A single conversation, a small operational change or a decision to raise an uncomfortable issue may seem insignificant. But repeated consistently, those actions build credibility and momentum. His point was that small actions may have little visible consequence in isolation, but their cumulative effect can help demonstrate that sustainability is not simply something discussed at conferences or written into corporate strategies.
For an industry that has spent years defining what sustainable tourism should look like, the next challenge is more practical: Can businesses make it part of how they actually operate?
The answer, according to the PHIST panel, will depend on whether sustainability is given a purpose, embedded into culture, connected to business performance and supported by stakeholders beyond tourism. Certification may show that a company has met a standard. But the real measure of sustainability may increasingly be whether the business, the people around it and the destination itself are stronger because it chose to act.
