Episode #41: This is Your Lifeboat Drill – Dr. Bijan Khazai CEO Hotel Resilient

Explore true resilience in hospitality and tourism with Dr. Bijan Khazai, CEO of Risklayer GMBH and Hotel Resilient. This German-based scientific benchmarking company prepares the global hospitality industry for crises like pandemics, natural disasters, and climate change.

Dr. Khazai shares his journey from studying disaster recovery to applying these principles in hospitality. Learn how to assess risks and prepare your organization, regardless of size. Gain valuable insights and access free tools to boost your resilience today!

 Key Takeaways:

-       What disaster and climate resilience in practice looks like 

-       How disaster recovery modeling can help hotels 

-       What is the foundation for risk-based resiliency thinking 

-       The two issues with current standards 

-       How important it is to have an entire ecosystem of resilience 

-       How important it is to collaborate with your DMC

-       3 Key areas to understanding risks 

-       The drivers of risks 

-       Understanding your site conditions to avoid natural disasters

-       What California is doing as a destination to mitigate risks

-       What the intersection of resilience and sustainability is

-       The difference between destination stewardship and destination management  

-       What is the Sundai framework 

-       How critical success factors are connected to the UN SDG’s

-       Who is a good candidate for a high-risk assessment 

-       How to identify monetized exposed risk 

-       How when DMC’s, Tourism companies and hotels work in collaboration it can acquire more business 

-       Why this information is so critical to insurance and financial institution

Show Notes:

You can find Dr. Bijan Khazai’s organizations below:

HotelReslient.org

RiskLayer.com

Connect with Dr. Bijank Khazai on Linked in:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bijan-khazai-4305b448/

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#HotelResilience, #DestinationResiliency, #DetailedAnalytics, #Riskmanagement, #KeyRisks, #CommunityResilience, #VisitCalifornia, #SustainabilityandResilienceStrategy, #NaturalDisaster, #CriticalSuccessFactors #Stakeholders, #ESG, #HotelManagement, #StrandedAssets, #UNSDG, #GlobalPolicy, #TourismValueChain, #ClimateRisk, #HotelInvestment, #DestinationManagement 

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Sustainable Hospitality podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Amy Wald. We are so glad you're here. And don't forget to make sure and sign up for our newsletter where biweekly we are going to bring you practical tools and tips and resources to begin your sustainability journey. along with some of our highlights from our favorite podcast episodes and some really interesting sustainable hospitality products. You can find that link on www.greenluxinc.com. But for today's episode, we are excited to talk to Dr. Bijan Kazai. He is the CEO of Hotel Resilient. And he where he is responsible for leading the development of the resilience guidelines, standards and technology enabled solutions to support the hospitality sector and tourism destinations with standard adversities and make them more resilient, climate friendly and sustainable. there is so much to dig into hotel resilient emerged from the hotel resilient initiative under the global initiative for disaster risk management and that is implemented by the german development organization it's otherwise called the gid but I'm gonna let dr bijan talk about that more um as a scientific benchmarking company based in um germany the mission of hotel resilient certification is to be the definitive resource to the global hospitality industry in preparing for crises like the pandemic that we just went through, natural disasters, and of course, climate change by bringing together cutting edge risk analytics and technology-based resilient solutions. Hotel Resilient enhances guest safety and business continuity and contributes to the resilience of local communities, destinations, and national economies that rely on tourism. Dr. Bijan is in Germany right now, but you actually received your undergrad and your PhD at Hotel Berkeley in California. So you've got your hands a little bit in everywhere, global reach, and we can't wait to hear all about your journey and what these tools look like in action. Welcome today, Dr. Bijan. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Amy. Really good to be with you. And thanks for having me on here and the opportunity to speak to your audience today. Absolutely. You know, I first became aware of you and your work by tuning into ITB in Berlin every year the past few years. I haven't yet been lucky enough to make it there. And I am so fascinated by your work. You are doing incredible things. And the name Hotel Resilient really encompasses everything when it sustainability is the way to a resilient organization and destination. So if you would take us through a little journey, how did you come up with all these ideas? What did your path look like? And we want to hear all about it. Sure. I'd love to. Yeah, it's been a long journey actually to Hotel Resilient. I started my like far from a tourism and the hospitality industry. I was a civil engineering grad student at UC Berkeley modeling landslides and how earthquake induced them. That's my PhD. Um, and, and, but I was always interested in making my research applied and meaningful. So when I finished my PhD, I had the opportunity to do a post-doctorate in looking at recovering from disasters. So leaving a little bit, the, the simulation world of, you know, computer modeling and going into, uh, more interdisciplinary work, working with social scientists, economists. And of course, once you are in a place like new Orleans, where I was, looking at what happened there after Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami. I was in Sri Lanka for three months looking at the recovery processes of tourism destinations. It's immediately in your world and looking at that as a key sector that is vulnerable to crisis and now, of course, the impacts of climate change. but it wasn't until many years later, actually, when I took on a job at the university here in Germany at the Kasseler Institute of Technology, 2015, so this was like 10 years later after I left my PhD and did all these studies in disaster recovery and still doing lots of modeling as well, that we were offered or we applied for and got a grant to develop standards for resiliency for the hospitality sector. And Amy, the reason that came about was that every two years there is a global assessment report that the global community puts together called the GAR. And it's led by the UN, the UN Disaster Risk Reduction Office. And their finding was that there is no harmonized consistent standards across the hospitality sector when it comes to disaster and climate resilience. And this is a sector that has lots of standards. We know about all sorts of sustainability standards, right? And all sorts of certification companies around it. And the idea was to try to get to more coherence there. And so I led this consortium while I was still at the university and brought together private sector partners, academia, and also tourism associations. So PATA, Pacific Asia Travel Association, was a big part of this. The UN Disaster Risk Reduction Office was, and as you mentioned, the German Development Agency. Um, and, and over two years, we started this in the Philippines. We piloted this with, with hotels in, in various destinations and Cebu and Pohol in Manila, and try to really understand, you know, from a resilience perspective, what hotels can do to become resilient. And yeah, that, that was the start of the journey, 2015, but we had also a lot to learn. through that journey. So I'd be happy to share those types of lessons and where we got to from that initial beginning. Wow. To think about there not being a resilience standard for hospitality and tourism is really mind-boggling because of all of the industries in the world that are vulnerable and at risk in that sector. Thank you for your work. That's incredible. And I think it's important. You know, hospitality is so busy in the everyday inner workings that they don't stop and think about those things. But COVID was a big eye opener, I think. So maybe let's talk about what does preparedness look like? What are some of those risks? how do you even start to begin to think about mitigation? Excellent questions, all of them actually. And they're big questions, right? Like if- Yeah, we answered in 30 minutes for sure. I'll try to wrap my head around and try to be more concise. But we had exactly those questions when we started this project to develop standards. So we started with a lot of interviews to kind of see what is the status quo? What do big hotels, small hotels, large independent hotels, chains do actually? And you have 100 page crisis management document that big hotel chain, like Marriott might have put together and looks at crisis management. And you will have a four page document that a independent owned hotel, but still a large resort will have put together. And it's based on their own lived experience, because here we are in regions that are constantly impacted by disasters. So there is a lot of that in there. But it's also Googled and ad hoc and pulled together from various sources. Or maybe a manager leaves a larger hotel, comes into a resort and brings that experience with them and it gets iterated and reiterated. So there is a lot of value in what is actually there. The issue is that two things in my mind. One is there is no sort of consistency, right? So there is no comparative measures to say, okay, across the industry, these are what we would like to measure ourselves in terms of our performance. And these are some guidelines that we can agree on in terms of implementing and and these are ways of how we can prioritize that that more or less is coming into shape for the sustainability world but it's nowhere near and when you talk about crisis climate risk resilience So that was the big challenge is, OK, you do all of these different things. They're lived because, you know, there's people who care about protecting lives and making sure hotels are operational again. So it's valuable. But how do you actually build standards out of that in a way that also can become global standards, right, that you can bring it from a place like the Philippines to a place like San Francisco? So that's one. And the other big challenge is that a lot of this stuff was actually done in a very generic way. So as we still do it a lot of times when we talk about crisis management, we talk about it as if all risks are equal, as if we don't need to treat earthquakes differently from a tsunami, from a flood, from drought impacts and water scarcity. So understanding what is your risk footprint and how you can actually go about reducing those risks, preparing for them, managing them, that's the foundation to risk-based resiliency thinking. And this is where we had to kind of get in there and said, okay, we can put together a document. We had to, that was our deliverable for this project and produce some guidelines. But the only way that these guidelines will become applicable is if they are actually implemented in some easy to digest steps. And in a way that can be tailored to your own context. So that it's not just, okay, here is something high level, but how do I take this now? How do I actually measure my own risks? And based on my risk footprint, start engaging into these standards and see where I'm at. That's the benchmarking process. But importantly, what can I be doing to get to become more resilient? And how do you measure that? So those are the challenges that we were faced with starting this project. but it led out of the Hotel Resilient Initiative, which was a two-year project into a company because we realized that we have to build a whole ecosystem, that it's not enough just to put guidelines in there, that you need software to help hotels actually analyze their risks, identify that, and then build the technology, the training programs, and that ecosystem to actually take the hospitality sector through the process. So it's a long journey, right? But I think the important part is, as you're saying, with standards, you can start to implement small measures. Maybe if you're a smaller organization, knowing that it's going to be, you know, a road just as any long-term strategy, anything that makes your organization more resilient takes time and energy. But let's talk about some of those tools. You have some incredible tools on your website, and we'll make sure we link those in the show notes that people, even travelers, can go in and take a look at. They're really interesting and eye-opening, too, to the fact that there are risks everywhere. No one is... you know, is isolated from this. So what are some of those tools that can be implemented and you help hoteliers and organizations put into place? Sure. So the DNA of these tools, what brings them together is actually my beginnings as a risk modeler, right? So I never kind of left that and got together with a lot of similar people in my university career that know how to model risk. And the issue with that is that often risk models are tied up. Either they're inaccessible because they're behind sort of the academic walls and, you know, Academicians use them, write papers on them, but they're not really translated into understandable metrics for industry. And the other issue is that a lot of this is behind proprietary walls, that large consulting firms will have and advise insurance, reinsurance for big portfolios of corporations, but they're not openly accessible. So that's where we started building tools, is we brought all of that into an open source tool. By the way, this is something I should emphasize. The tools that we'll be talking about are openly accessible, right? So anyone registers on hotelresilient.org. can go set up an account and start with the process. So that's the way we want the hotels to come into this, is to be able to start with a risk assessment. And so what we have done is that we bring these global models of all sorts of hazards at high resolution globally, but then we ask questions about your site conditions. What kind of soil are you on? How far away are you? from the beach, at what elevation. So those are your side factors. Then we get into the building. We'll ask questions that an engineer does not necessarily have to be there, so there's lots of visual to guide you through. But we'll ask about your foundation, your building age, your height, your roof connections, these types of structural questions that help us assess the risks. And then we'll get into the building content. And then we'll get into the what we call systems around the hotel. So evacuation systems, warning systems. So we understand for fire, for example, there is warning systems set up. But how are these set up for other types of crises? How do we know how to evacuate vertically in case of a tsunami versus, you know, evacuating essentially indoors if you have a flood. So there are all sorts of standards that have been developed around those. And finally, we get into a sort of management component, which are protocols that deal with bringing all of this together into a crisis communication plan, into a preparedness plan, into business continuity planning. So they're SOPs that we're dealing with. And so we've created the standards around what we call site and building systems and management. Those are the three key areas. And each one of those areas then breaks down into its relevant parts. It's guided through a software, but it starts with that really important process of identifying your risk. So from that point onwards, we're asking questions that are relevant to you based on your risk profile. that makes it much more, I think, digestible for someone because this is a big subject. And for someone out there thinking, oh gosh, how would I ever get started? So you really just need some specifics about your business and your building and your surroundings to really go in and start answering questions. Is that correct? That's correct. Exactly. So you are bringing in your information about You're building information about what you're doing, what you're not doing. So those are essentially we've turned the standards into questions and criteria. And so we are asking you and we're providing context, additional information, visuals to guide you through that process. But you're essentially clicking and saying, I'm doing this, I'm not doing this. know and then you're scored at the end and and this you know you can start creating tasks as you're doing this you can prioritize those tasks so there's some management tools also for you to actually pick up on those things that you're not doing but there's a report at the end that says you know your resilience score is A 60, what does a 60 mean? And then what are some areas that you could be working on? And then you prioritize those areas and you start trying to implement those and see how you can be improving over time. What an incredible tool. And to make it available to everyone is really a gift. So we want to make sure that everyone out there listening goes and plays around with this tool and signs up and starts to think about these risks. Because, again, no one is going to be left out with the unfortunate things that we have coming. And another crisis like COVID could be around the corner. We don't know. God forbid. You mentioned something about site conditions. Yes. And when I think about that, I think how important it is then to be working in tandem with your DMO, your destination management organization and the destination as a whole. I know you've done a lot of work around this. And I think about places like Fort Myers in Florida last year or the year before that. I mean, I think all the hotels were washed away, were destroyed. You know, a great example of how important these kinds of plans are to have in place. Talk about what that looks like from a DMO standpoint, destination, working with the hotels and some of those projects that you've worked on. Perfect. Yeah, no, that's a really good point you bring up because essentially we're saying that hotels are not a silo, right? It's not an island onto itself. And now I'm implementing all these measures. I'm resilient. No matter what happens in my destination, we're good. It doesn't work that way. It's a system of systems. And we, from the beginning, took a destination lens at this. I think the most effective way to be working on this is to sort of get destination wide ownership over the standards. uh and DMOs are a big part of that you know where they're not just looking at marketing but they're looking at destination stewardship as as their goal and they're able to use their convening power to bring sort of all the stakeholders and and to think okay here let's look at a sort of common set of standards a common picture measure ourselves and let's see not just from the hospitality perspective but in terms of roads and infrastructure, in terms of how emergency planning is done. How fast can we get a fire truck to a hotel and do we have enough? Where would we evacuate visitors? And then when the community might come to hotels and use those as evacuation spaces, will there be enough room available? All of these things require pre-event coordination and collaboration, mutual aid agreements. So those are the kind of tools that we work with. And with the destination, as with a hotel, we start with detailed analytics. So we start with identifying the key risks driving a destination, but then we have other elements of exposure to work with, right? We're working at the level of a destination. You have the attractions, you have the infrastructure, You have the community that you have to think about in terms of their resilience or vulnerability of livelihoods that may be at risk. So it gets a lot more complicated. But I think that is really the way to address this is think about hotel resilience standards as a subset of destination resiliency. And they have to work in tandem to really provide a holistic solution. And you asked about projects that we're working on. There's a few that we've worked on. And the one that is currently going on right now is with the state of California. So Visit California has asked, and we're part of a consortium that includes JLL and Ernst & Young and some other partners. But the idea or the part that we're contributing to, it's a larger project, is looking at developing a sustainability and resilience strategy for the state of California. So the state of California divides its tourism regions into 12 different regions. And for each region, we are going through this process of identifying what are the key drivers of risks, but also measuring then how is risk being understood by the stakeholders? How is it being managed? What investments are being made? folding that all into a strategy that you know gets prioritized with the stakeholders that we have on board so there's 150 stakeholders across these 12 regions over these two years that have invested a lot of their own time and knowledge that they bring to it and and we're trying to sort all of this through and put them uh you know we're measuring this with what we're calling critical success factors so there's seven that we've identified for the state and four of them tie into resilience four of them tie into sustainability, and you're saying, why seven? This is eight. One of them in the middle is investing in resilience and sustainability, and it's sort of the common denominator. And along each one of these critical success factors, we've identified measures and metrics by which we're looking at evaluating resilience and sustainability for these regions. And the outcome is you know, to come up with incremental recommendations, how to get the state to move towards goals that they have identified as important. And what's also important is that these goals are actually tied into global policy. So in the case of resiliency, we have the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction, which is the equivalent um of the paris agreement for the world of disaster risk reduction and you know nations have come together and agreed on four key priorities of how to reduce disaster risks and so we're tied into those as well as the paris agreement on climate aspects and on the sustainability size of course it's the sustainable development goals that the un has put together so all of these critical success factors are anchored into various SDGs or Sendai priorities. So the state actually has a contextualized approach that the stakeholders are driving. That's important for them to take ownership. But then also when they set targets, where do we want to be by 2030, those connect to the global standards. Wow. This conversation, I hope, is an eye opener for some of those people listening. You know, we talk a lot when we talk about climate change, talk about interconnectedness. And this is just proof that in order to. ensure stability within an organization, you have to be considering all of these factors out there and they all play into one another, but at the center of it sits you know, investment and planning and really forward thinking to prevent and be prepared for these things. So you work a lot with the GSTC, I know. I know you were just at a speaking event and a conference. I'm not sure where it was. Was it in? In Stockholm, their latest GSTC conference. Yes. Yes, so that's the Global Sustainable Tourism Council who really kind of has set the criteria out there and has become the standard for these certifying bodies to create certifications, whether it be a hotel sustainability certification or in this case, a destination. So there's something called green destinations. And I know that California has adopted I know that Napa, not Napa, Sonoma County, we had Claudia Becchio. But like you're saying, Visit California is right. Are they adopting these same principles? How does that play into the destination? Fantastic. Now we're getting into the weeds. Super. No, the GSTC, as you mentioned, is the global body that has developed and through a consensus process of engaging participatory process experts and various stakeholders over a lengthy period of time standards that address destinations, but also address various elements of the tourism value chain. For destinations, the GSTC, the current version is looking at sustainability foremost. There is some elements of risk, but resiliency is not addressed in the way, let's say that we're doing this for this project with Visit California. And we're in discussions with GSTC to see how we can bring some of these tools in terms of a risk-based resiliency sets of criteria. into the sort of next generation of the standards. But the state of California is sort of forward thinking in that way and has, at least I know Los Angeles is engaged, city and county of Los Angeles is engaged with the GSTC to look at a sustainability certification for their region. And as you mentioned, Sonoma, I don't know if it's green destinations or what certification body that was brought in, but GSTC as such is not the certification body. They are the accreditors that accredit certifiers. And of course, they've developed the standards, so they will work with destinations to prepare them. uh for getting certified and there's trainings that they do uh various levels of engagement but then there is a certification body that comes in um that is gscc accredited and then can certify you know put that sort of stamp on a destination and green destinations is is one of those there's a few others as well and it just seems like a natural evolution for that criteria, you know, certifying a destination to start to add that, you know, those risk elements in there. I hope I see that happening soon and in the near future. So Dr. Bijan, who would be a good candidate? Talk about, I mean, you know, it's probably obvious if you're on the coast or you're in, you know, a risk area, but who would be out there that you would say you really need to start thinking about this? I mean, in our minds, it's probably everyone, but that's unrealistic, unfortunately. So talk to us about, you know, what you think that that candidate looks like. Yeah, I mean, if you are sort of taking the now perspective and this is how most of us actually think, what was in the news last week, what is in my perception, high risk, then of course you're talking about risk-prone places like Southeast Asia, like the small island developing states in the Caribbean or in Asia Pacific. And so you have a lot of sort of vulnerable candidates where they're facing this right now. It's a living reality for them. They see a storm or an earthquake or an active volcano, what have you, as part of their process of needing to cope and adapt to. So those are the places naturally that we're targeting as sort of the moment is already here. But I hope what we're able to offer is more than that in the sense that, so we've talked about the Hotel Resilient platform, but all of this connects to the modeling of our parent company, Risklayer, which actually was founded before Hotel Resilient, where I'm also the CEO of. And what Risklayer does is provides future projections of climate impacts um and you know here you can be looking at 2030 2050 2080 so whatever your planning horizon is most of us don't think that far ahead but if you're interested to know what could be changes in my destination along those time horizons and then of course We have different emission scenarios, business as usual to sort of an aggressive one, a conservative one. So what assumptions you make, and on top of that, there's a whole bunch of uncertainty, which modeling always had that should not be left unsaid. Still, it does give you a relative picture of what might be some risks that we would be facing in the next 10, 20 years. And this is what the state of California was particularly interested in with increased wildfire risk, less snow cover, water scarcity. You know, those are some issues that are already in the perception of a lot of stakeholders. But if you ask today, what is your number one risk? They'll say homelessness, you know, because that's present and present. pertinent whereas some of these long-term impacts which actually we we did modeling of the tourism assets that are exposed so we looked at exposure of various layers of tourism assets from the hotel sector to attractions and you know monetize the exposed values and then started throwing at it various layers of risk And then you can actually get to a monetary appreciation of what loss and impact in terms of direct losses would be on a much longer planning horizon. So we talk about the big earthquake in California and it could happen tomorrow. It can happen in 50 years. It could happen in a longer span than that. We don't know. That's why it's probabilistic. We look at historic occurrences of these events. and then model the likelihood of them happening. But if they happened, what would be the monetary loss? And those are huge. And then we average those over one year periods and we call it the average annualized loss. So those are values or metrics that for a tourism stakeholder would be interesting because it says, Homelessness is a key issue right now and it's driving a lot of policy. But have a look at sort of this portfolio of risks and what an average annualized loss looks across your risk footprint. And that helps them sort of then put things in perspective beyond our very human, you know, perceptive mind to something that's more objective and based on science and data. Gosh, great point. And I think about for destinations that rely on tourism, this should be really a number one priority to be looking ahead and projecting what could be coming down the road. And how to avoid and mitigate it. And you, you know, you talk about monetized exposed value, you know, in, in my climate change classes in university, we talk about externalities, right? So what kinds of loss monetary, you know, numbers can be associated with climate change. And we haven't, we still really haven't been able to put dollar values on carbon and things like that. So, This to me seems much more tangible. You're taking tourism that has a direct economic influx and value and saying, if you don't do these things, these are the monetary losses you could have. Absolutely. And Amy, by the way, that's how the financial world thinks about these things, right? Insurance functions on those types of models and metrics, and they make everyday decisions based on that. The issue is that the industry itself is largely unaware of this or is not using this information. And traditionally, this information has been locked up behind paid walls. And, you know, it's, it's highly technical, so it requires expertise. It requires modeling capacities and compute to, to get at these values, but more and more these. you know, models are becoming open, there's more access to it. And, you know, our whole mission or objective is to be translators. So we do the modeling, but we don't need to start from scratch. You know, when we look at climate impacts, we go to CMIP6, which is the latest climate models that the scientific community has put out. But then we do that last mile. We take those CMIP6 values and then we try to translate those into, you know, less snow depth. What impacts that has on the tourism sector and then try to really connect the dots by providing relevant metrics. Wow. Such an important conversation. And does Risk, have you had any conversations about Risk Layer being integrated into something like Edge or Lead or anything like that? Gosh, I just think that would be just such an amazing collaboration. Yeah, we've had And I know he was on your show, several conversations with LEAD. And we haven't made that collaboration happen. And I'm aware, of course, of Edge. But yeah, I think for us, collaboration is the way to go. because this problem is way too big for a small group like ours to solve it alone, of course. And even a bunch of groups coming together will face a lot of challenges. So the more sort of like-minded people groups organizations get together and see that there is you know a shared value here that is you know just makes sense to collaborate because you know it's everything is more efficient that way actually than you know carving out little competitive spaces and and trying to compete so very happy for for that to happen um I think it's just also time finding time to get together with with these organizations and figuring out ways to work together. That needs some incubation period, and we're hoping that can happen fairly soon. Yes. If we all just had six more hours in a day. Yes. Like I think about Europe adopting a four day work week and that is wonderful, but I can't get everything done in four days. So unfortunately, and I, anyway, that's a whole nother conversation. That's a whole nother topic. You know, you mentioned really quick about, you know, collaboration and talking about your experiences. And that's one of the, You know, that's one of the points that Claudia Vecchio, to bring her up again from Sonoma County, talked about. She's the president of the tourism board there. And she said, this is all about learning from everyone's experiences. And I think that's just so incredibly valuable. So, Dr. Bijan, I'm sure you have, well, it's evening. It's the evening in where you are, right? Starting to become? It's starting to, but yeah, we get 9.30 p.m. is when it gets dark here. Oh, wow. So we have some- Still a long day. Well, we want to let you- that says something to your audience uh so lots of germans are excited tonight but amy can I follow up on your last point regarding collaboration because absolutely you know I i can't say enough about that I was you know and a bunch of us were asked at the itb as well as the gstc what you think is sort of the most important thing to happen within the world of sustainability and the answer across the board is collaboration collaboration collaboration and that's what we need in our case, and this is one example where it just makes sense to collaborate, or it would be foolish not to, is when you think about you know, fiercely competitive industry, which are destination management companies and tour operators, very competitive. But in one instance, you know, they're going to different hotels asking for the same sustainability information, but maybe asking it in slightly different ways. And the hotels already, having to comply with these requests, we'll have to send out and fill out yet another form. And one thing where Hotel Resilient has come in where collaboration just makes sense is to say, why can't we agree among a group of large DMCs and tour operators, what are sustainability standards that you want to have information on, align those with GSCC, but address them in a way that's relevant to the DMCs. And then we use the hotel resilient platform to obtain this information and the DMCs and tour operators then access that information and are able to create portfolios of hotels. So if one DMC picks it up, then it's available to all the others. And that way we can be a lot more efficient with both time that hotels would have to fill out these surveys, but also quality information because DMCs and tour operators are the ones often that go on site for various other reasons, but we'll do a check, right? So if a hotel doesn't have the resources to get certified, which includes a lot of hotels, It's expensive to get certified. At least there's a verification process and trust that this information that's provided and it's housed into this platform has seen someone that is truly interested in the sustainability profile of the hotel because that's what they want to recommend the travelers and is putting that out there for the other DMCs to use. So that's been one experience for us where collaboration has made a lot of sense and we've been able to get normally competitive destination management companies to come together and share these information pieces together. That's great. So are you saying that Hotel Resilient acts as a database and these DMCs can access that information? Exactly. Okay. Okay. So the hotels benefit from this. Why? Because now this information is available across a number of DMCs. And that means more business can be generated for them. because if they're sustainable and no one knew about them, now they can be in sort of the preferred lists of the DMCs and have travelers being sent to them. And the DMCs benefit because they don't have to go and do this on their own for every single hotel that's in a destination. They'll contribute some of the effort, but they'll also be able to leverage the effort of the other partner DMCs on the platform. So that's the model by which this works. That's great. And I do want to just touch on really quickly, you mentioned sustainability certifications for hotels are expensive. Yes. I will say I'm really excited about Green Key Global. because they have created a framework that is very low barrier to entry. It's essentially like hitting some of the big buckets. As long as you are willing to do that to get started, you can get your foot in the door for actually a low cost. And then you look and build your strategy and move forward. So, you know, there are options out there that allow you to kind of just get that baseline without thousands and thousands of dollars. Now, the entire journey, sure, there's going to be investment involved, but they've made it very attainable, which some of the others, which are amazing. Earth Check is one of my favorites. but it takes a lot more upfront investment to get in the door. Definitely. And that's, Amy, that was talked about at length at the GSTC event in Stockholm, really the paradigm of doing this in a phased approach and then providing the industry with actually priorities. These are areas that they prioritize among their own standards that should be implemented for sort of you know getting in stepping in and then of course you can step up and sort of do the other stuff but you give them time to get there and that also means resources in terms of costs of these can be lowered if you're just looking at a subset of these criteria yes definitely so dr bijan where can everyone find you um how can they get in touch with you how can they follow your work and see what new developments are happening Thank you, Amy. I mean, if you want to get in touch with me personally, I'm on LinkedIn. You can Google me or if you want to look up our website, so hotelresilient.org, written as one word, hotelresilient.org. not resilience. Sometimes it gets confused, resilient. And then Risk Layer, also spelled as one word, .com is the parent company. My email is on both of those sites as well. Happy to be in touch with you to carry this conversation further if you have questions or comments and feedback, you know, and And as you mentioned, if someone out there thinks there is a collaboration opportunity, that's also wonderful and we welcome that. Wonderful. And we will make sure that we link all of those websites just so there's no confusion in the show notes so people can get to you easily and quickly without problem. I want to thank you for your time today and we thank you for the work you're doing. It's really incredibly valuable. Thanks for the opportunity and great to be with you today. Yes, I hope we get to meet in person one day, maybe next year at ITB. And thank you, everyone, for tuning back in. We are so grateful for your support. Please help us further our conversations. Like, subscribe, and share this podcast. And let me know what kind of topics and guests would you like to see on the show. Connect with me on LinkedIn. We will see you next time on the Sustainable Hospitality Podcast. Enjoy your day, everyone.