2 From sustainable architecture to
sustaining comfort practices
Air conditioning and its alternatives in
AsiaTim Winter
For many travellers to Asia, TripAdvisor has become a key resource for
researching the quality and satisfaction levels of hotels and guesthouses. More
recently, the website has begun identifying and tracking the environmental
credentials of its hospitality register, encouraging users of the site to consider
the issue of sustainability in their choice of accommodation; an initiative that
forms part an industry-wide move toward the all-encompassing mantra of
“sustainability”. In recent years, the travel and tourism sector has developed a
plethora of awards, guidelines, and policies directed at “greening” the industry
in recognition of the need to curb energy and resource consumption. For many
hotel owners, this has become a feature of market differentiation and helped
encourage more people to partake in responsible tourism. Accordingly, as
part of listings criteria and on the comments pages, TripAdvisor encourages
readers to pay attention—through its GreenLeaders program—to issues such as
water usage, laundry, landscaping, lighting, and the degree to which hotels and
guesthouses consider the environment in managing their resources and energy
consumption (TripAdvisor 2015). In the highly competitive and stratified world
of hospitality, balances are constantly struck between luxury, cleanliness, and
comfort on the one hand and saving costs and the environment on the other.
While TripAdvisor’s growing attention to the environmental implications of
travel and tourism has helped encourage hotels and guesthouses shift this balance
toward the latter, the question of how they manage their indoor climate has yet
to be highlighted as an issue worthy of attention. In fact, the site considers
indoor air, or more specifically its cooling and drying through electronic air
conditioning, less as an issue of environments consequence and more a marker
of quality and comfort. Many establishments highlight air conditioning (from
now also AC and air-con) as a key feature of their product offering. As an
indicator of reliable, optimum, all-year-round comfort, hotels in the four- and
five-star sectors proudly proclaim their rooms as being not partially but “fully”
air-conditioned. It is a situation that has led to the rise of tens of thousands of
hotel rooms across Asia featuring inoperable windows, with guests having little
control over their comfort levels beyond choosing between a narrow pre-set
range of temperature settings on the thermostat.