Caterina Malorni: Slow Hospitality
Caterina Malorni, Glion Institute of Higher Education Graduate with Honours, began her career in the Hospitality field since the first year of college. Very young yet very passionate about her job, she has collected multiple experiences, in Miami, Barcelona, London, Ibiza and Tulum, that shaped her as a person and as a professional.
Today Caterina works for an exceptional reality, a very extra-ordinary facility that lays its foundation in the most important value of all: sustainability.
The Granja Farmhouse in Ibiza, a 10 room boutique hotel with ten hectares of land and a farmers department from where they source all products, and the Treehouse in Tulum, a creative laboratory with 5 rooms & a contemporary Mexican restaurant, facilitating the exchange of ideas between artisans from the Oaxaca coast, Mexico City and the Yucatan peninsula with international artists and designers.
These are the two realities in which she has been working for the past year, where she had to learn how to make every client happy while having the commitment to use only local and sustainable products to fulfill their needs while maintaining excellence standards.
Q: What is your own definition of Sustainable Hospitality?
For many years we have lived in a world where the concept of having limited resources has not been contemplated. We have had everything available at any time of the year, in any season and in any shape without taking the consequences into consideration. In order to have all foods, services, tech appliances available all year long, you are at the same time exploiting a country, a person, the environment and so on. When it comes to sustainability many of us think of reusable energy, eliminating single use plastic and recycling, which is indeed great, especially because many big corporations have already made huge changes towards this direction.
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But there is much more than that. For me Sustainable Hospitality is using the available resources without having to source them elsewhere but from where you are located: eating organic food that comes from local farmers, supporting the local artisans, giving back to the community, connecting and learning from the country you go visit. Hospitality is sustainable when you embrace and deliver the culture of a country without bringing in a foreign standardised vision. It’s understanding that things as they are given to us from nature, are not perfect and appreciating the beauty of imperfection.
Q: The Treehouse in Tulum and the Granja Farmhouse in Ibiza are both in a very green environment, which immediately gives the feeling of an eco-friendly structure. Do you think that this vivid feeling can be achieved in a more urban location?
Of course, a green environment is a big part of sustainability but it is not all. You can start with a sustainable base in terms of systems, in order to save energy or even better opt for reusable energy when possible and take it from there. The feeling can progressively be achieved by supporting local artisans, farmers, artists and all those trades that were kind of forgotten because of the hectic lives we have been living.
Q: Do you think that being socially responsible and having a sustainable approach has come to play a crucial role in the clients' decision when picking their facility or, are there other aspects that are still more relevant to them?
Social responsibility and sustainability have become a crucial aspect of our lives and we all know that they are here to stay, but indeed they cannot be the only drivers for clients when picking their facility.
Guests need more than an environmentally friendly building, especially in these uncertain times, where all our beliefs are sort of crumbling down, they need a sense of belonging while sharing a common purpose. We share the common purpose of sustainability by making our people enjoy the experience of becoming sustainable, and we do it through a very carefully selected weekly programming of gatherings, workshops around local arts and crafts, cine forums, rituals around food and music, meaningful talks.
The programming is sent out to our community that goes beyond just the guests staying at the hotel: it works like an exclusive club that you can only join if you are invited by an existing member.
Q: Which are the challenges that you face on a daily basis, to meet your clients' expectations? What are the next goals to achieve in order to become even more successful?
As I was mentioning earlier, the problem so far is that we all thought that resources were unlimited. So the challenge now is to create a re-educational process for the guests; what is crucial is that the learning has to be experiential, no one likes to be taught, especially as an adult! This is something that in La Granja we are doing through food, where the guests learn about permaculture: working with nature and not against it. For instance, it is not normal to have a mango available in August in Ibiza, instead our guests can eat the freshest and most organic peach available from the land that we cultivate. Mother nature decides.
I think that, in a way, the pandemic helped us to understand this, as all of a sudden everything we took for granted wasn’t available anymore.
We invite our guests to a multi sensorial experience that makes them think and then realize that these are values to live with in their daily life. To overcome this educational challenge, it all comes down to the Slow Hospitality concept. We spend time with the guests and make sure we transmit these old new values to each one of them. In fact, this can only be achieved through the most powerful tool that the hospitality industry relies on: people. If the service is attentive, genuine, carried out to the highest standards and connects with the guests at a profound level that goes beyond the business, the educational process will be extremely easy. But you can only achieve this if you surround yourself with a team of exceptional individuals that naturally live and breathe the values that you are trying to transmit.
Q: What is the next big plan for the future?
La Granja Farmhouse and Tulum Treehouse started as two independent projects. The next big plan is called SLOW, the brand that will stand above them and devised by long time hotelier Claus Sendlinger. It embraces all values of sustainability we just touched, especially the ones dedicated to the cultivation of arts, crops and inner gardens.
SLOW embraces the imperfect, the diverse and indigenous; it defies conventions and reframes the way people live, work and interact in times of haste and acceleration. With a Farm in Ibiza, a Treehouse in Tulum and soon a Campus in Berlin and Farmers Market in Idiluz, Portugal, SLOW provides more than a green facility and mere physical spaces. The ultimate goal is to go back to the community and that sense of belonging and common purpose. Something our guests will find at all of our properties.