Maldives Promotion House – Tourism industry’s leading environmental management, benchmarking and certification company, EarthCheck has recognized the environmental performance of Centara Grand Island Resort & Spa, Maldives with Bronze Benchmarking.

Centara Hotels & Resorts, has always believed passionately in green and sustainable tourism, a policy that is at the heart of the company and which engages every property in its portfolio.

With the company rapidly expanding deeply embedded philosophy is more important now than ever.

“Each of our hotels and resorts operates to strict environmental standards,” says Thirayuth Chirathivat, Centara’s chief executive officer. “This means involving staff, and also whenever possible guests, with the result that there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and that everyone feels they have a personal contribution to make.”

Centara also strives to comply with regional and international environmental laws and legislation.

Along with this very positive approach, Centara has begun working in conjunction with EarthCheck, the specialist organisation that sets the benchmarks for environmental awareness and conservation for the international hospitality industry.

“Working with EarthCheck involves the use of their Environmental Management System, a series of practical tools for the benchmarking and certification of operations practices,” says David R Good, Centara’s vice president for operations, whose responsibility covers the environment.

“The environmental performance of each property is monitored against policy, benchmarking the indicators against baseline and best practices. The environmental and social impact is measured through the EarthCheck Online Self Assessment. All results are assessed and verified by third party auditors on an annual basis.”

Centara has started with 10 hotels under this Earthcheck programme. Four hotels have recently achieved Silver Certified status and another six hotels have achieved Bronze Certified status.

Centara has now committed to have all of its self-owned Centara Grand properties to be Silver Certified by 2014.

In order to achieve Bronze Certified, participating hotels are required to have a sustainable policy in place, including key major indicators for energy, water consumption, recycling waste and waste sent to landfill, and paper usage.

To achieve Silver Certification all participating hotels are required to have a sustainable policy in place and to implement an environmental action plan for proper monitoring and measurements on 10 key performance areas, namely greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency/conservation and management, management of freshwater resources, ecosystem conservation and management, social and cultural management, land use planning and management, air quality protection, waste-water management, waste management, and environmentally harmful substances.