What Does a Kinder Brand in Cambodia Look Like?
I recently had something remarkable happen while planning my upcoming trip to Thailand and Cambodia in late October. The moral of the story as it relates to visioning will reveal itself at the very end so please read on.
Using Expedia, I had reserved two hotels in Siem Rep, the main city just minutes from Angor Wat, a temple complex in Cambodia that is the world’s largest religious monument on over 400 acres! Visiting here has been on my bucket list ever since I first saw magnificent photos of Angor Wat in a coffee table book at a client’s house over 20 years ago.
There were so many beautiful hotel options so I reserved two, which of course, you can do on these platforms, and thought I’d revisit them later in the hopes that THE one would jump out at me and let me know, “this is the place to stay.” But that didn’t happen. I got very busy with work and forgot to close the loop on this. Instead, a couple of months later I got a notice that my deadline to cancel was coming up, and I needed to make a choice…either Zanier Hotel or Treeline Urban Resort. Regardless of how compelling they both were, I just couldn’t decide. So I started searching again to see if there was something I was missing. And sure enough, I came upon a hotel that had Climate Change, Community and Sustainability on its navigation buttons! I couldn’t believe it. A socially responsible hotel in a country that is still dealing with the aftermath of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime which killed nearly 1/5th of Cambodia’s population. And that’s when it hit me: if I feel so strongly about social responsibility in commerce here in Santa Barbara, why wouldn’t that matter to me in places where I choose to vacation? And it does! The choice became clear, and the rest will be history when I return on November 21st.
So what does this have to do with visioning? Hard as it may be to believe, but I started this planning without a vision! It wasn’t until AFTER I found the hotel that I understood why I was struggling to make a clear choice: I didn’t have a north star guiding my choices. Having connected with the hotel’s mission inspired me to create my vision and look more closely at not just where I’m staying and the sights I will be seeing but the kinds of experiences I’m wanting to have and the way I want to feel while I’m there and when I leave.
Here’s a sneak peek at this special hotel:
With a unique design inspired by 1960s Cambodian Modernism, this boutique hideaway mixes beautiful style with a social conscience. The interiors showcase the work of local artisans and were created using sustainably sourced wood and local stone.
The hotel supports various NGOs with 48 paintings scattered around the hotel commissioned from the city’s Small Art School, which gives free art classes to underprivileged children.
It is also the country’s first plastic-free hotel, helping to launch the ReFill Not Landfill initiative, a campaign aimed at revolutionizing the way water is consumed by tourists in Cambodia. By partnering with Coola-Products they took a lead in dealing with plastic waste in Cambodia. This hotel aims to be a 100% single use plastic free establishment and does this by encouraging the use of reusable drinking bottles – which they offer when you arrive – replacing millions of single-use plastic water bottles each year!
So stay tuned for November’s newsletter in which I reveal the name of this hotel and whether it lived up to our definition of a kinder socially responsible brand.