Sinatur Hotel & Konference: Sustainability
is about making conscious choices

Sinatur Hotel & Konference consists of six hotels in Denmark that provide the setting for meetings, conferences, festive events, restaurant visits and private hotel guests. For a number of years, Sinatur has worked purposefully with sustainability, both through certifications and labelling schemes, and with the internal anchoring of their sustainability strategy.

In their due diligence process, Sinatur has worked with communication to ensure that both guests and employees understand the journey the organisation is on to become a more responsible hotel and conference venue. It has been crucial for Sinatur to invite guests into the dilemmas that sustainability also entails, so that the responsible choice is not perceived as a limitation, but as a good alternative. In a business with many employees who have direct contact with guests, employees has also received special attention in their communication.

Sinatur aims to ‘translate’ the organisation’s sustainability initiatives into communication that employees understand, making it an integral part of the workday in their hotels and restaurants. For example, Sinatur has an app for employees and has also developed online stories to enable employees to answer questions about sustainability choices. This could be about the choice not to offer exotic fruits and red meat on the menu or removing orange juice from the breakfast table.

In addition to working on the internal articulation of choices and opt-outs, Sinatur has also developed a campaign to ensure that guests also understand the choices the hotel has made. This has turned into an external communication campaign about the dilemmas of working with responsibility in your business. The communication highlights the challenges that have no clear-cut answers and can be difficult for a company to face when working with sustainability.

The focus of the campaign is thus not the positive portrayal of sustainability initiatives, but the difficult considerations Sinatur has made. ‘Is organic necessarily the most sustainable? Is locally produced the most sustainable? Or should you actually limit your consumption of the product?’

In this way, the campaign draws attention to the doubts and considerations that can arise and some of the dominating rationales that have existed in the hotel and restaurant industry – such as offering a wide selection on the menu or the frequent change of towels.

The response to Sinatur’s dilemma campaign has been positive, and the hotels have experienced increased interest from guests. The transparent communication of challenges and considerations resonates with consumers who face the same considerations in everyday life, for example in the supermarket. Guests and employees can see themselves in the dilemmas that arise when you want to make the most responsible choice – even if it means limiting or moderating, and accepting that you don’t have the same selection all the time.