In the Knowledge Session - III of BW Hotelier Event organised on 5 December at The Park, New Delhi, different panelists shared their views on the "The HYAC Challenge: How does the investment in Green Technologies pay off". The panelists who participated in the session include Niranjan Khatri, Founder & principal Consultant, iSambhav; David Hopcroft, General Manager, Le Meridien Gurgaon; Anirban Sarkar, General Manager, Country Inn & Suites, Sector-29, Gurgaon; Dhananjay Kumar, General Manager, The Suryaa and Praveen Agarwal, GM (Engineering), Lemon Tree Hotels. Bikramjit Ray, Executive Editor, BW Hotelier, was the moderator for this session.
The discussion started off by introducing the methodical environmental-friendly facilities that each of the leading hoteliers have applied to their groups of hotels in India. The revealed a lot on the lines of the kind of investment that they have put in and the kind of returns they have been getting through the green technology they have used on a fairly large scale.
Niranjan Khatri, Founder & Principal Consultant, iSambhav, "No one wants to move forward first, we have a sun- trenched country and we can easily use daylight. Look at the kinds of opportunity we have, the kind of buildings we want to develop can only be made if our engineers become 'Bio-engineers'. We should learn from the nature, study the cooling effect of plants."
David Hopcroft, General Manager, Le Meridien Gurgaon, "Innovation can never take a back seat and the needs should be met with time, we cannot be working 20 years behind the industry. We have gone up to experimenting with low temperature wash, generation of electricity through solar power and not only that hospitality is also taking initiatives like green synergy across all our representations."
Anirban Sarkar, General Manager, Country Inn & Suites, Sector-29, Gurgaon, "We are thinking about enhancing and estimating capacity cost, so as to reduce the whole lot of pressure on the innovation facility cost."
Dhananjay Kumar, General Manager, The Suryaa, " What we started from the electricity boiler and have reached to steam boiler, all the halogen lights have been changed to LED. People always worry about return of investments in these cases but I can assure that surely the investments are higher, but the return is much faster than we think."
Praveen Agarwal, GM (Engineering), Lemon Tree Hotels, "I think especially in the lavatories if we have used capacity management systems, deciding an optimal usage of water resource, and for occupied rooms as well. It has really worked for us."
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