What It Takes to Make Sustainable Hospitality Measurable in the UAE

Radhika Arapally

Hospitality is entering a more exacting phase of its sustainability work. In the UAE, hotels are responding to tighter waste rules, sharper expectations from owning groups, and rising scrutiny around environmental claims.

We are grateful to Radhika Arapally for speaking with TCC and sharing sa practical view of where sustainable hospitality is heading in the UAE. Radhika works directly inside that shift from intent to action. As the Founder of Sustainability Kiosk and Senior Strategic Representative for the UAE at the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, she brings a grounded view of what hotels need to make better sustainability decisions. Her background in data insights and loyalty analytics, including work with Lloyds Bank, Dunnhumby, and IHG, has shaped her view that hospitality already holds significant operational data, but needs to use that data with the same commercial discipline it applies elsewhere.

In conversation with Radhika, we explored the challenges the UAE’s hospitality sector faces, from trust gaps to regulatory pressures, and what it takes to embed sustainability into operational performance.

1. What originally sparked your interest in sustainable hospitality, and how has that passion evolved over the years?

Honestly, it wasn't a lightning-bolt moment. My background is in data insights and loyalty analytics with years at Lloyds Bank, Dunnhumby, and IHG, watching how data changes decision-making at scale. What I kept noticing was a sector sitting on enormous operational data, with proven solutions already available, doing very little with either from an environmental standpoint. The spark wasn't ideological; it was pattern recognition: significant footprint, real regulatory exposure coming, and none of the commercial discipline other operational functions had already built.

What's evolved is my view on timing. Early on, I thought the industry needed persuading that sustainability mattered. Now I think the harder job is helping hotels operationalise something they already believe, a different problem entirely. The gap isn't awareness. It's infrastructure, accountability, and the willingness to treat environmental performance as a business metric, not a communications one.

2. Sustainability Kiosk connects hotels with trusted green solutions. What gap in the UAE market inspired you to build it?

The gap was trust and translation. Hotels wanted to make better choices but had no reliable way to evaluate whether a solution actually delivered, or whether it fit their context. On the supplier side, genuinely good solutions struggled to reach procurement because they didn't speak hotel. Sustainability Kiosk was built to sit in that gap, not as a marketplace, but as a layer of credibility between hotels and solutions, where we validate impact, ROI, and who else is already using a given solution. We now have 90+ solutions listed on sustainabilitykiosk.com, and we're exploring AI in how we market them, to bring more nuance to each listing than a static directory allows.

The UAE added a layer of complexity on top of that: the regulatory landscape was moving fast, ESG expectations from owning groups were shifting, and most hotels had no one to translate between the compliance requirement and the operational reality.

It's also part of why I take the UAE Senior Strategic Representative role for the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance seriously; it means the work we're doing on the ground with individual hotels stays connected to where the global conversation is heading, rather than operating in a regional bubble.

The Responsible Hoteliers Summit grew out of the same instinct. Sustainability Kiosk does consulting by the day, but I kept seeing how much got unlocked just by putting hoteliers, solution providers, and policymakers in the same room, rather than each working through intermediaries. Some of the most useful conversations in this industry happen when a hotelier can ask a regulator a direct question, or a solution provider hears, unfiltered, why their pitch isn't landing. That's hard to manufacture through one-to-one consulting alone. Last year, we conveyed 200 delegates at Anantara Downtown Dubai, an industry event , delivered in partnership with Dubai Sustainable Tourism and World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance. The third edition of Responsible Hoteliers Summit is to take place on 26th November and we look forward to welcoming innovators, thought leaders, hoteliers to join us at the event,

3. How do you see tools like HOST helping UAE hotels make real progress toward net positive hospitality?

HOST — the Hospitality Operational Sustainability Tracker, as a dashboard matters because decisions follow data, and most hotels here are still making sustainability calls on instinct, anecdote, or a GM's hunch. HOST replaces that with a continuous operational picture: not a once-a-year audit or a certification snapshot, but live performance data GMs and sustainability leads can actually act on.

The bigger shift is accountability.

When a department head sees their consumption benchmarked against comparable operations, alongside the cost savings and financial impact of specific initiatives, the conversation stops being about whether sustainability matters and starts being about what's happening and why. It's the same journey Revenue Management went through fifteen years ago from specialist function to something embedded in how the whole operation thinks about performance.

HOST is built to do that for environmental metrics. Net positive hospitality isn't a vision statement; it's an operational outcome. And you can't manage an outcome you're not measuring.

4. The UAE has intensified its focus on waste reduction — single-use plastic bans, Dubai Municipality's push for source segregation compliance. How are these regulatory shifts reshaping hotel operations, and where do you see the biggest gaps in readiness?

The regulations are moving faster than the operational infrastructure that's the honest assessment. Hotels have largely responded to the plastic bans with procurement substitutions: alternative amenity bottles, no more straws. That's the easy layer. The harder work is waste stream discipline, consistent source segregation at the point of generation, staff behaviours that hold up under peak occupancy, and supplier agreements that actually support what you're trying to do back-of-house.

When we started Sustainability Kiosk in 2022, we proved this with Anantara The Palm Dubai with over 60% waste recycling at a mixed-use luxury resort. That gave us real validation that SOPs, waste stream mapping, team training, and governance actually move the number. Today, Anantara The Palm holds the Dubai Sustainable Tourism Gold Stamp, a real tribute to the work behind it.

The biggest gap I see is documentation and verification. When we do waste audits, we encounter that most hotels can't demonstrate compliance with any rigour because they haven't built the internal systems to track and evidence what's happening. That's a manageable problem now, but it grows as Dubai Municipality enforcement tightens and as owning groups start asking for auditable data instead of narrative reports. The regulatory direction is clear. The readiness gap is treating compliance as a systems problem, not a communications one.

5. The UAE is seeing a surge in sustainable tourism certifications — Dubai Sustainable Tourism Stamp, GSTC and others. Are certifications driving real change, or are hotels still treating them as compliance checklists?

Both are true simultaneously, and the distinction matters. Certifications create structure where there was none. For properties that engage seriously, they're genuinely useful with surfacing gaps, forcing documentation, giving sustainability teams internal leverage to push changes that wouldn't otherwise get prioritised. That's real value.

But the checklist dynamic is also real, and it comes down to how hotels resource the process. When certification is handed to one person, completed in a sprint before the deadline, then filed away until renewal, it produces a credential without producing change.

The tell is in the data: does resource consumption actually shift year on year? Does the team on the ground understand what the certification requires of them day-to-day, in a way that drives continuous improvement? If not, the certificate is a marketing asset, not an operational outcome. Certifications aren't the problem, where as the question is whether leadership treats the process as accountability or as an approval to collect.

This is about to get sharper. Under EmpCo — the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, applying from September 2026, terms like "eco-friendly" or "carbon neutral" will be restricted in consumer-facing marketing unless backed by third-party verification. That directly affects how hotels here market to European leisure guests, and it's already shaping expectations from European tour operators and corporate buyers who don't want exposure to unsubstantiated claims further up their own supply chain.

6. When you look across the insights from your podcast guests, what themes stand out as especially relevant for the UAE hospitality industry today?

One thread runs through almost every conversation at Sustainability Stories Podcast (which has completed 50 episodes this month), regardless of the guest's background or focus: the gap between stated commitment and operational follow-through. People frame it differently as a measurement problem, a culture problem, a resource problem; but it's the same underlying issue. Sustainability still sits at a layer of the organisation that doesn't have the teeth to influence the decisions that actually matter.

The second theme is the shift from sustainability as a CSR function to sustainability as a risk and value question sitting on the CFO's desk. That's already happened across parts of Europe. In the UAE, it's beginning with the EU's EmpCo Directive (Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition, applying from September 2026) and the UAE's Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2024 on climate change, enforced by MOCCAE, are creating real exposure sustainability and legislation. The hotels operating at the intersection of finance and sustainability see this clearly. The challenge is that most UAE hotels haven't yet had the conversation that makes it real for their leadership teams.

We're about to push this further. Season 2 launches shortly, and it widens the lens beyond hotel operations to the bigger picture: the impact of sustainable travel itself, what certifications actually mean for destinations, and the destinations stepping up to lead rather than follow.

We're also building out more ways for the industry to stay in the loop between episodes, our WhatsApp channel and newsletter (Responsible Hospitality) carry the shorter updates, regulatory shifts, and event announcements that don't always warrant a full episode but are worth knowing in real time.

7. Hotels are focused on short-term survival given regional challenges. Has sustainability taken a back seat, and can we realistically expect hotels to invest in it right now?

It's a fair question and I'd rather engage with it directly than give a rallying-cry answer. Yes, sustainability has lost priority in some properties. That's real. When revenue is under pressure, discretionary spend gets cut, and sustainability initiatives that were framed as investments rather than operational necessities are among the first to go.

But there's a version of this story that's more precise: what's actually taken a back seat is sustainability as a budget line. What hasn't taken a back seat, for the hotels making smart decisions, is sustainability as an operational efficiency lens. Energy and water are major cost centres. Waste has disposal costs attached to it. The properties that have measurement infrastructure in place are finding that the same discipline that reduces environmental impact also reduces operating cost; and that's a conversation finance teams are willing to have even now. The mistake is letting the sustainability programme be defined entirely by its discretionary elements, because those are exactly what gets cut. The case for the embedded, measurement-driven work is actually stronger in a difficult market, not weaker.