Sustainability has become part of the language of modern hospitality. Is your hotel commercial marketing strategy taking this seriously?
What you’ll find in this article
Why hotels should offer a better “vegan-friendly” guest experience and more plant-based options?
When the vegan guest experience is an afterthought, it affects loyalty and long-term revenue.
What is the “veto vote” in hospitality?
Learn why vegan guests are one of the most influential decision makers in a group booking.
How to include plant-based & sustainability in your hotel marketing strategy?
Sustainability efforts, plant-based menus and guest experience should have a coherence message.
How does sustainability and vegan hospitality affect your hotel positioning?
Developing a clear message about the vegan guest experience can turn into a commercial opportunity, support brand loyalty and reputation.
Hotels are reducing single-use plastics, introducing towel and linen reuse programmes, investing in energy efficiency, sourcing locally and finding ways to reduce food waste.
All of these initiatives matter. But there is a broader question hotel leaders should be asking: How far does your sustainability strategy actually extend through the guest experience?
Because sustainability is not simply about what a hotel recycles, removes or saves.
For hotels positioning themselves around wellness, sustainability, nature or conscious travel, it is also about the food they serve, the materials they use, the experiences they promote and whether the values communicated through their marketing are reflected in what guests actually experience.
Plant-based hospitality is an interesting example. It is often treated as a dietary requirement or a small section of the restaurant menu.
But looked at through a commercial lens, it can influence guest experience, brand positioning, restaurant selection, loyalty and potentially even whether a hotel captures or loses a booking.
The opportunity is therefore much bigger than just adding another vegan dish to your menu.
It is about understanding how sustainability, positioning and guest experience work together to create preference and commercial value.
Vegan hospitality is bigger than vegan guests
I recently discussed this with Meredith Marin, co-founder of Vegan Hospitality, for an episode of The Hotel Marketing Lounge a section in my YouTube channel where I interview global industry leaders about strategic hotel marketing perspectives.
One of the main topics we explored was how inconsistent the experience can still be for vegan travellers.
One hotel may have thoughtfully designed plant-based dishes, trained staff and clear information throughout the guest journey.
At another, the guest may arrive and discover that their only meaningful option is a salad.
Technically, both hotels may say they “cater for vegans.”
The guest experiences are completely different.
But there is another misconception worth challenging.
Plant-based hospitality isn’t relevant only to people who identify as vegan.
Guests increasingly look for plant-based options for different reasons, including personal preferences, health and wellness considerations, environmental values and some dietary requirements.
That makes the potential audience much broader than a hotel might initially assume.
- For a wellness resort, for example, a strong plant-based culinary offering may be a natural extension of its positioning.
- For an environmentally conscious lodge, reducing reliance on animal products may reinforce the sustainability story it is already telling.
- For a luxury hotel, thoughtfully designed plant-based dining may simply be part of delivering the level of choice and personalisation its guests expect.
The strategic question therefore shouldn’t only be: “How many vegan guests do we have?”
A better question is:
“Could a stronger plant-based experience make us more relevant to the guests we want to attract?”
Watch my full conversation with Meredith Marin on the future of vegan hospitality.
The commercial impact of the “veto vote”
One of the most commercially interesting concepts Meredith discussed during our conversation was the “veto vote.”
Imagine a group of six people choosing a restaurant. Five will happily eat almost anywhere.
One is vegan.
If that person cannot have a meaningful dining experience at a particular restaurant, the group is unlikely to leave them behind and go anyway.
They choose somewhere else.
The vegan guest may represent only one-sixth of the group, but their requirements can influence 100% of the purchasing decision.
The same principle can extend beyond an individual restaurant choice.
Families, couples, corporate groups, wedding parties and groups of friends often make hospitality decisions collectively. The needs of one person can therefore influence where several people spend their money.
This changes the commercial conversation.
A hotel might look at the percentage of vegan guests in its database and conclude that the segment is too small to justify attention or investment.
But that data may not capture the bookings that never happened because the hotel wasn’t considered suitable in the first place.
Nor does it capture the influence one guest can have over a larger group’s decision.
This doesn’t mean every hotel needs an extensive vegan proposition.
It means hotels need to understand the decision dynamics of the guests they want to attract, rather than evaluating an opportunity purely by the size of an isolated segment. That’s a fundamental part to avoid the expensive mistake of trying to attract “everyone” to your hotel.
The guest experience starts before the restaurant
Another common mistake is treating vegan hospitality purely as an F&B responsibility.
Imagine booking a luxury hotel that positions itself around wellness and sustainability.
The website communicates conscious living and thoughtful experiences.
Then you arrive…
- You need to ask what you can eat at breakfast.
- The waiter needs to check with the kitchen.
- There are no clearly identified options at another outlet.
- The minibar offers little that is relevant to you.
Perhaps other parts of the experience rely heavily on animal-derived products or promote animal-based entertainment that feels inconsistent with the values communicated by the brand.
The issue is no longer simply whether the chef can prepare a vegan meal.
There is a gap between positioning and experience.
And this matters particularly at the premium end of hospitality.
Luxury hospitality is not about making a guest repeatedly explain what they need. Great hospitality anticipates.
If a hotel knows before arrival that a guest follows a plant-based diet, that information can inform the experience from pre-arrival communication through breakfast, dining recommendations and other relevant touchpoints.
The difference is subtle but important:
Accommodation reacts to the request.
Hospitality designs for the guest.
Photo courtesy: Vegan restaurant, Luxury Resort in the Maldives
Sustainability should be considered more holistically
This is also why hotels should think beyond the most visible sustainability initiatives like:
- Recycling programs
- Reducing food waste
- Energy and water efficiency
- Removing unnecessary single-use plastics, etc..
But sustainability can also invite wider questions about what a hotel serves, purchases, promotes and builds into the guest experience.
For some hotels, that may include considering:
- how much choice plant-based guests have across outlets, rather than at one restaurant
- whether teams understand plant-based requirements and can communicate confidently with guests
- where animal-derived products are used in amenities, furnishings or other touchpoints
- whether animal-based entertainment or guest activities are consistent with the property’s stated values
- whether culinary, wellness, procurement, marketing and sustainability teams are working towards the same brand promise
The objective isn’t to create a universal checklist that every hotel must follow.
The objective is alignment.
A city business hotel and an eco-retreat in Costa Rica will not need the same sustainability strategy.
A traditional luxury resort and a vegan wellness retreat should not have identical guest experiences.
What matters is that the decisions make sense for the hotel’s positioning, ideal guest and commercial strategy. That is what turns sustainability from a collection of disconnected initiatives into something strategically meaningful.
When sustainability becomes part of positioning
This is where sustainability starts to become particularly interesting from a marketing perspective.
Positioning creates an expectation.
If your hotel describes itself as sustainable, regenerative, wellness-led or environmentally conscious, guests will interpret that promise through the experience they receive.
Your restaurant menus are part of that.
- So are your amenities
- Your activities
- Your procurement choices
- Your communications
- Your partnerships
- Your team
And most importantly, your guest experience.
If those elements reinforce one another, sustainability can become part of a much stronger and more distinctive proposition.
If they contradict one another, the positioning becomes harder to believe.
This is why I believe hotel leaders should avoid treating sustainability as a separate department, report or marketing message.
It needs to connect with the wider commercial strategy. So here are some questions you should be asking yourself and your leadership team:
- Who are we trying to attract?
- What do those guests value?
- What do we want to be known for?
- What experiences would make that positioning tangible?
- Which initiatives genuinely reinforce that proposition?
- Which activities are we pursuing simply because they are expected of us?
Those are more valuable strategic questions.
I explored this positioning and sustainability gap further in The Hotel Marketing Briefing.
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Better plant-based hospitality can support loyalty too
There is another commercial consideration that is easy to overlook: how a guest feels when their needs have genuinely been anticipated.
For someone who regularly has to research menus, email hotels before arrival or explain their requirements repeatedly, finding a hotel where the experience feels effortless can be meaningful.
That matters because loyalty isn’t created only through points programs. It can also be created through recognition, trust and the confidence that returning will be easy.
A guest who knows: “They understand me there.” has one less reason to search for an alternative next time.
And if that guest is also influencing where their partner, family or group stays, the value of delivering the experience extends beyond one individual.
This is where the discussion moves from: “How much will improving our plant-based offering cost?”
to:
“What commercial value could a more relevant and considered guest experience create?”
That doesn’t remove the need for financial discipline.
Hotels should still understand demand, operational feasibility, training requirements, procurement and potential return. But evaluating the opportunity purely as an additional F&B cost misses the bigger commercial picture.
Photo courtesy: Vegan restaurant, Luxury Resort in the Maldives
Sustainability, guest experience and commercial strategy should not operate in silos
This is ultimately the broader lesson.
Hotels frequently separate conversations that the guest experiences as one.
- Marketing develops the positioning
- Sustainability develops initiatives
- F&B creates menus
- Operations delivers the experience
- Revenue manages rates
- Commercial teams focus on demand
But the guest doesn’t experience departments. They experience one hotel.
And when those individual functions aren’t aligned, gaps become visible.
A hotel can invest heavily in sustainability and still create an experience that feels inconsistent with its positioning.
It can have excellent vegan dishes that nobody discovers because they’re absent from its marketing.
It can attract environmentally conscious guests through its communications and then deliver experiences that contradict the expectations it created.
It can invest in new initiatives without understanding whether they matter to the guests most likely to drive commercial performance.
This is why strategic alignment matters. The opportunity is not simply to do more sustainability.
It is to determine which sustainability practices make sense for your positioning, which guests they matter to, how they should influence the experience and how all of that supports the commercial direction of the hotel.
A practical starting point for hotel leaders
Before investing in another sustainability initiative or expanding your plant-based offering, I would start with five questions:
- Who are the guests we most want to attract, and what do they genuinely value?
- What does our current positioning promise about sustainability, wellness or conscious travel?
- Does the guest experience consistently deliver that promise, including for plant-based guests?
- Where could we currently be losing preference, bookings or loyalty because of gaps in that experience?
- Which changes would strengthen both the guest experience and our commercial proposition?
The answers may lead to changes in menus.
But they may also lead to changes in training, procurement, communications, amenities, experiences, partnerships or positioning.
That is the point.
- Plant-based hospitality isn’t simply a menu conversation
- Sustainability isn’t simply an operational conversation
- And positioning isn’t simply a marketing conversation
They are interconnected parts of the same commercial guest experience.
The question worth asking
If your hotel claims sustainability as part of its positioning today:
How far does that promise actually extend through the guest experience?
And if your ideal guest looked beyond the marketing language, would they find a hotel intentionally designed around the values you say matter?
Because stronger commercial performance doesn’t always come from attracting more people.
Sometimes it comes from understanding the right guests more deeply, designing a more relevant experience for them and giving them a stronger reason to choose you, return and recommend you.
Start with strategic clarity
If this article has prompted you to think differently about how your hotel’s positioning, sustainability commitments and guest experience connect to commercial performance, I’d be delighted to continue the conversation.
You can request a complimentary Strategic Clarity Session, where we’ll explore the opportunities, gaps and strategic decisions that could strengthen your hotel’s positioning and long-term commercial direction.
