From a wooden key card in a guest’s hand to a quiet cold-storage room behind the kitchen, the resort’s sustainability journey is told through the care woven into each ordinary moment of a stay.
Holiday Inn Resort Bali Canggu has spent the past year quietly reshaping how it operates through small, deliberate changes in guest rooms, kitchens, offices, and back-of-house corridors. From wooden room keys to waste sorting and digital front-office processes, the changes are practical, visible in daily operations, and designed to reduce waste and resource use. Over the last twelve months, these initiatives helped the resort cut single-use plastic by 40% and reduce overall waste sent to landfill by nearly 30%. The switch to digital front-office systems led to a 25% decrease in paper consumption across the property. These tangible results reflect the ongoing commitment to making sustainability part of the everyday experience for guests and staff.
“Sustainability isn’t something we practice once a year, it’s a principle that guides the way we operate every day,” said Ankit Airon, General Manager of Holiday Inn Resort Bali Canggu. “From the amenities we select for our guest rooms to the way we manage resources behind the scenes, every decision begins with the same question: Is there a more thoughtful, more responsible way to do this? More often than not, we discover a better way.”
This philosophy is reflected in the resort’s day to day operations through a series of thoughtful choices, each designed to reduce environmental impact without compromising the guest experience. The room keys are crafted from wood rather than plastic, a small departure from convention that guests often comment on. That same instinct carries through to in-room amenities, thoughtfully re-selected over time to favour reusable, refillable, or non-plastic alternatives wherever the guest experience allows. At the resort’s dining outlets, the shift continues: takeaway boxes, cups, straws, and cutlery are made from biodegradable materials or wood, a deliberate choice to keep plastic away from Canggu’s shoreline and the ocean beyond it.
Some of the resort’s most meaningful changes are also its least visible. Guest registration and billing at the Front Office are fully digital, sparing paper without slowing the welcome a guest receives. In guest rooms, traditional oshibori have given way to wet eco tissues, a change that, multiplied across thousands of stays, reduces the water, detergent, and energy once spent on laundering. At the back of the house, when offices are empty, lights are switched off, a simple habit repeated nightly that steadily reduces energy use and carbon emissions. Organic and residual waste are carefully separated at the source, then weighed, logged, and handed over to appointed vendors through a documented daily process. Recyclables are sorted further into paper, metal, plastic, and glass to give each material the best chance of a second life.
One detail the team is quietly proud of: before organic waste ever leaves the property, it rests in its own cold storage space, affectionately nicknamed the “waste refrigerator” by colleagues. It is a simple gesture, but a telling one. Instead of letting food scraps sit out in the tropical heat, the team gives them the same care as any perishable ingredient, keeping the back-of-house cool, odour-free, and pest-free until collection day. It is a reminder that sustainability, at its best, lives in small daily habits as much as grand gestures.
That same resourcefulness carries into the kitchen, where the culinary team practises nose-to-tail and root-to-stem cooking, finding new purpose in broccoli stems, beet greens, and other ingredients once destined for the bin, discovering flavours that make their way onto the menu. Not as an afterthought, but as an invitation, sitting comfortably alongside the resort’s signature offerings for those who want lower-carbon choices without compromising flavour.
The resort’s sense of responsibility does not end at its boundaries. On weekends, colleagues can often be found along the Canggu coastline, sleeves rolled up, taking part in beach clean-ups alongside the community they call home. Further inland, a different contribution is taking shape: through a partnership with a third-party organisation, the resort channels its donated Used Cooking Oil (UCO) into a waste management education programme for local Bali schools, turning a kitchen by-product into a lasting lesson for a new generation in caring for the island they will one day inherit. A part of everyone’s day, whether a colleague finishing a shift or a guest returning from the beach. It is a small design detail but reflects the resort’s broader belief: sustainability works best not when it asks people to change who they are, but when it makes the caring choice the convenient one.
Holiday Inn Resort Bali Canggu will continue to grow these, working alongside its team, its guests, and the local community, not because the work is ever finished, but because it is worth doing well. As these efforts continue, the resort remains committed to making sustainability part of how it operates, every day.
