As a sustainable hotelier, you are committed to the well-being of your guests and ensure that they can fully enjoy their vacation – without a guilty conscience.
What makes someone choose this path? How does one become a sustainable hotelier? In this interview series entitled “Pioneers of Sustainability”, Green Pearls® hoteliers answer this question and share their thoughts on sustainability, the hotel business and their careers.
Marc Traubel from the HUBERTUS Mountain Refugio Allgäu in Balderschwang.
HHUBERTUS Mountain Refugio Allgäu
On Milestones and Continous Change
We join Marc Traubel in his office in the hotel’s former gym. Laughing, he tells us that he was moved here when they needed the space in the shared office for other purposes. Behind him, a hiking backpack hangs on a coat rack. “The view to the south is sensational,” he says, pointing his camera out the window and at the mountain opposite. In winter, however, he can’t see anything, he explains – there are four or five metres of snow on the wood pile in front of the window!
Green Pearls®: Hello Marc, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
Marc Traubel: Yes, it would be my pleasure!
GP: How would you describe your hotel in three words?
Hubertus Mountain Refugio Allgäu Spa
Marc: We did a brand workshop a few years ago, and the result was: powerful, precise, and moving. Those were the three words we came up with after a long process. I can’t say whether this process is still accurate today. I haven’t thought about it for a long time. Powerful, precise, and moving was already very good.
*He thinks for a moment*
I’m going to say familiar. Familiarity is something that fits us well.
Individual. I hate standards.
And unique in a certain way.
GP: How long have you been in the hotel business?
Marc: In the hotel business? If you like, I’ve been in the hotel or hospitality business for over thirty years. If not even longer. When I was ten years old, I stood behind the bar for the first time and helped in our cabin. I started my apprenticeship about 25 years ago. And I have been in my parents’ hotel for 12 years.
I was in various hotels, such as Oberallgäu, where I did my apprenticeship. I was still allowed to join the German army at that time, I was in Lech for a winter season, and I spent two years in the Black Forest and two years in Nuremberg. Then two years in Heidelberg because I studied business administration there, then two years in Dubai and now for 12 years back in my parents’ business.
GP: Have you been interested in hotels’ sustainability from the beginning?
Marc: Mei, when one says they have lived and worked in Dubai … You know how this city or this country works. You often have to close your eyes. What happens there, what resources are used here to try to bring in tourism once the oil resources have been used up …
My father started very, very early to implement various technical possibilities in the property. And I’ll put it bluntly: it was not to save electricity, but I would say that the predecessor of sustainability was saving money, being thrifty. In the past, people tried to conserve energy because it cost them money. Rooms were only heated as long as they were needed. Ventilation was all but switched off. Many such details used to be implemented from a different perspective. I know this from many hotels, where it was simply a question of money. And now, the whole concept is presented as sustainable. But I think many hoteliers have been working on this for a long time and are looking at how they can work efficiently. Now it’s about saving resources. In the past, it was about saving money.
Sustainability is reflection
GP: Was there a pivotal moment for you when the decision was made to turn the HUBERTUS into a sustainable hotel?
Marc: It happened gradually and over many stages. I mean, we have had a pellet heating system for twelve years, but at the same time, we still had an oil heating system for ten years. We decided to do away with it two years ago. But that was a decision that had nothing to do with sustainability. The heating was good, and what would have been the advantage of tearing it out? It was a fail-safe. We needed it five times a year.
I’ll be honest, Greta Thunberg made many people think with her ideas. And us, too: Do we need this, do we need that, do we tear that out? There was never a clear-cut moment, never a big bang. Often there were simply realizations.
We live in the middle of the mountain world. Nature determines our lives and shapes our lives. And it always has. Of course, this plays a role in certain decisions. Especially now, after the avalanche, in both a positive and negative sense, nature is even more present in our minds. We have learned that you have to respect it. And then, of course, we incorporated that into the new construction of the Mountain Spring Spa. If not now, when?
But also in the culinary field, we have long focused on regionality. For example, with our meat. The pigs, the calves and the cattle. I don’t know if that’s part of it, but for me, it certainly is. Many of our pigs have been down by the stream for many years. So we show the guests the rhythm of life. The pigs are down there now, fed over the summer, they have a good life, and then, at some point, they end up on our barbecue.
Whether you call it environmental education, sustainability, or, I don’t know what, a change of mind has taken place very smoothly.
Mile Stones, Avalanches and History
GP: Could you briefly describe your evolution in three or four milestones?
Marc: Briefly in terms of history: The building we are sitting in right now, the original building, will be a hundred years old next year. And my grandparents bought it 71 years ago. Why my grandparents came here back then is not known. But something must have kept them in this place.
Perhaps that year alone, 1951, on the first of August, that step into independence in Balderschwang is a significant milestone.
What is a second milestone or a special moment is when my grandfather died quite suddenly in 1980. My uncle and my father returned, leased the business from my grandmother and shortly afterwards realised that all three in one place were too many. So we leased a second business as well.
Maybe that was the transition: the death of grandpa and passing on to the next generation because they had to and because they had to fight. That was a second big step in the development of this hotel.
A third major milestone came about 22 years later when the topic of wellness popped up. The Traubel lads, as they were called, dared to enter the wellness hotel business. My mother trained as a pharmacist and naturopath, so we brought things like wellness, Ayurveda and yoga into the hotel. In a time twenty years ago when some hotels had saunas the size of telephone booths!
A very, very extreme event, which was not planned, was the avalanche that hit us on January 19, 2019, and destroyed our spa, which we have always said is our core. And which we then wholly rebuilt again.
It does not take much to become a sustainable hotelier.
GP: What do you think it takes to be a sustainable hotelier? Or, to put it another way: How does one become a sustainable hotelier?
Marc: Common sense. That’s the be-all and end-all. I would say that sustainability in the hotel industry stands on two major pillars. Firstly, the food: where does it come from, and how are the animals kept? That’s very, very important. It just can’t be that a kilo of pork fillet costs 5 euros. That’s not possible. That can only be sh*t. Sorry for the honesty.
We have switched to organic for most of the food and have much local pork, beef and chicken suppliers. If you try to avoid the big suppliers, including big cash-and-carry markets, now and then and buy directly from the producer, it’s not much more expensive. Sometimes it’s a hassle to process stuff like that. But it just doesn’t cost that much more.
And second is the matter of generating energy, generating energy and making sense of it all. It’s not enough to say: Okay, I’ll put two liquid gas CHP units here and add two peak load pellet boilers. I’m a big technology freak who is always trying things out to increase the efficiency of the systems as much as possible. So, you need somewhat of a technical fascination with it as well.
GP: Putting it into perspective: What would a successor need to bring? What would you wish?
Marc: Well, first of all, I hope my successor will not come for many decades. What will change by then? I can’t say yet. It isn’t easy. They should be friendly and bring common sense and logical thinking. They can learn the rest. But a personal, positive attitude and logical common sense must be brought with them.
GP: What do you wish for the future?
Marc: So, in a way, we all have to rethink. A hotel of our size, no matter how it is heated, is a luxury property. You don’t need a pool. You don’t need four saunas. You don’t need a hotel room heated to 30 degrees. This is a luxury item. And we hoteliers have an educational responsibility and must try to pass this on to our guests with common sense. That’s also close to my heart.
There are always bad days, but there are always good days. I got a letter from a woman at the beginning of the pandemic. She sent me the story of a king and an adviser. The counsellor said: “Man, dear king, I’ll give you a note. You hide it somewhere. If you’re feeling really down, you pull out the paper and read what’s on it. And even if you’re doing really, really well, you take out the same piece of paper and read what’s on it.” And it said: “This too shall pass.”
So, when you’re feeling sh*tty and heartbroken when an avalanche hits you… That, too, will pass. And when you ride the wave of your success, like last year, when we had the best summer in our history, we made sales and worked like anything else… That, too, will pass.
And I can’t change the past anymore. So, I stopped thinking about it and looked ahead and into the now. What can I change now?
It keeps going, and the earth will keep turning. Don’t constantly dwell on the past. Some memories are good or bad. But I don’t need to get upset about it anymore because it’s over.
GP: I thank you for your time and the beautiful closing words.
Edited by: Administrator
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