With the great success of Public Thai Government to push Thailand as a main terminal of MICE industry, Thailand has now become number one destination for exhibition industry with the number of 71 exhibitions per year, the highest figure in Southeast Asia. Hotel business and other locations for exhibition have become a crucial key for a business success when Thailand take a more proactive approach for this type of industry, especially if you try to attract clients from the European countries and the United States because they have more concern of  the environment and its importance.

There is a hotel in Thailand that has received a great trust from international businesses; their location has been used in many occasions of meeting and seminar. Apart from the magnificent decoration of the place and impressive services, this hotel is proudly announced to the society that ‘We are for Green Globe’.

Centara Grand, a world class hotel, is highly success to invent itself as a Green Organization. It has received an award from Green Globe – an international accreditation organization. This is all can be achieved because of the strong determination and commitment to the environmental preservation of Mr. Michael Horn, General Manager – Centara Grand and Bangkok Convention Center at Central World.

Mr. Horn has established two long term plans to support his commitment in environmental preservation in term of hotel operation. One of which is the determination to receive a Green Globe Certificate (Silver), after received Green Globe Benchmarking (Bronze) earlier. All the operation standards focus on the concept of environmental friendly in order to reduce global warming and promote more energy saving while in the same time maximize the utilization of the energy being used. Centara Grand actually implements a higher set of standard than the one designed by Green Globe organization.

 “Environmental awareness is important topic to our guests. When the clients and society are passionately aware of environmental preservation, many hotels around the world must try to search for a better way to save water and energy consumption as well as waste management.”

“We have set a higher practice standards. We attempt to buy products used in the meeting from Thai business operators. Most of the products we buy grown in Thailand and has the production base in Thailand. Apart from local income distribution, other benefit is the reduction of co-ordination processes required when you have international business associate. These approaches not only complicated, they are also consume a lot of wasted materials, especially papers and printed media. They also well can be linked to the use of ink. If we can avoid all of these processes, then we can say that we have applied a more productive environmental approach. The hotel is also successful in reducing the energy consumption of air-conditioning, with the 20% reduction in electric bill. We have continuously planed and implemented energy reduction project for two years now, and it has been a great success. The hotel is able to cut out a significant amount of energy-related expenses.”

If one would compare a Green Globe Certificate as a ray of acceptance from society, there would be another program that would shine as bright from within. This program calls CEPPER. It has implemented at the Central Grand, Central World and Bangkok Convention Center as a pilot case. This program is set as a strategy that focuses on internal operation of the organization. Mr. Horn is kindly explained to us the deeper meaning of each key letter.

“The first C of CEPPER is “Community”. It means everything we do is for the greater benefit of the society. E is “Education”, it is not only something provided to our staff but also the education of our guests. The first P is “Partnership” – we are alliance, this can include manufacturers and material suppliers as well as our guests whom we provided the service to. The second P is “Product” – the product that we select to use in our business. E means “Eco-Technology”, this is because we see ourselves as large scale hotel and convention center, and we have invested in the hotel system so we can utilize the energy consumption of each section to the fullest. The last R is “Recycling” which is the major key in this program.”

Mr. Horn also explained several interesting activities in each section of CEPPER, for example, In Partnership or Alliance, cooperation has been created with the manufacturer to focus on the design of packaging. Now the packaging will use more environmental friendly materials, with the least use of plastic. All plastic bottles will be sent back to the manufacturing so that they can recycle them and then reuse them. The paper needs to be used on both sides, then the hotel will arrange the internally activity where the staffs will help each other creating a paper Mache from that used paper. Many of these paper Mache ended up being a piece of the decoration in the hotel that can effectively attract the eyes of the admirers. There are many other activities that the hotel apply to push their staffs to develop the sense of caring and concern to the environment. Each department will assign a role in CEPPER, each role will be evaluated with the perfect score of 200 points. After the meeting, the supervisor will then go back to their department, together, they will have to come up with the activity that fit into the guidelines of CEPPER in order to show the true potential of their team. The report need to be conducted and submitted to the executive, and that report need to be presented to the society every year.

CEPPER is an instant formula that pushes Centara to a front runner today. It has become a hotel that gain acceptance from all kinds of clients, especially the companies that organize seminar and meeting for a group of companies from Europe and The US. They are aware that this hotel be able to facilitate the Green Meeting as they requested. The very interesting details of Green Meeting package may include the use of wooded pencil (no pen-no ink), the box is provided for returning pencil and recycling paper inside the location , the information signage  will be printed on paper only, the information of the seminar will be shown on the LCD screen instead of using other one-time-used materials. Even though less than 50% of their customer requested the green package, however, with the reputation of a hotel that could response to various sorts of needs and the ability to present a more interesting choice of services, clients started to spread the words about their green idea. People are now more interesting in experiencing the hotel’s ‘Green Meeting’.

Mr. Horn also interestingly mentioned the challenging in the green market that “This can only be completed if all the parties involved do their part, from the manufacturer to the end user. But we still have the belief that green concept require higher investment, which is the reason why we need a focal idea that allow consumer, organizer, and owner of the location to come together and help make the green concept happens, it can even begin with something rather small. We shouldn’t let our good idealistic over cloud our good relationship even in the storm of obstacles, especially the higher expense. We, as a person, are the key to unleash all of the conditions. If there is no cooperation, we will never get to the finish line. We attempt to create such conscious in our human resources so that they will understand the importance of it, then a true cooperation will be in place.