Asia Pacific is the world's largest regional travel market, with
aggregated total gross bookings growing 5 to 7% annually and expected to reach
$540.3 billion in 2022, according
to Phocuswright.
As the tourism industry booms across the region, a cross-section
of stakeholders is turning its attention to sustainability and environmental stewardship
and how to spur innovation in a region of diverse cultural, political and
business environments.
Leading this effort are three organizations - the Pacific Asia
Travel Association (PATA), ADB Ventures (a subsidiary of Asian Development
Bank) and Plug and Play - which have created Travel Lab Asia, a corporate innovation
program focused on sustainability in travel.
Launched in September, Travel Lab Asia has a three-pronged
mission: to "accelerate the adoption of game-changing sustainability
technologies in Asia Pacific," to "actively track environmental and social impact
over time" and to "scale the impact across the region" and establish participating
brands as leaders in sustainability.
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In its first year, the initiative is focused on clean technology solutions
for the hospitality sector and has signed three corporate partners: Jetwing Hotels,
Minor Hotels and Hilton.
“We needed to focus somewhere, in one vertical, and hospitality was
such an easy choice because of the real triple-bottom-line incentive that
hotels have to invest in energy efficiency, alternative sources of energy, waste
management, etc.,” says Jason Lusk, a consultant with ADB Ventures.
“Our thesis was there are hospitality brands that were hitting a
plateau. They had done the easy stuff, and they wanted to do more, but had hit
the limits of what was technically possible in the region.”
The need
The first step for Travel Lab Asia has been to assess the needs of
the hotel partners. Between September and November, Graham Harper, PATA’s director
of sustainability and social responsibility, hosted workshops with executives
from the hotel brands, including representatives from their sustainability, engineering,
innovation and investment departments.
“Through a process of examining what they are currently doing and
what they need to do in the future, we dig down to the root causes of what’s
going on so we can identify the pain points and can come up with the very
strong needs statements on where their innovation is going to be done,” Harper
says.
“For all of them, sustainability is at the core of their business.
They know the impacts they are having have to be properly managed, just for the
survival of their own brands and business.”
Those “clean tech needs analysis workshops” uncovered interests
primarily around energy, waste and water.
The solutions
Now Plug and Play is leading the effort to identify entrepreneurs
and startups that are suited to address these problems, with solutions such as
efficient biomass energy production and enhanced storage capacity for renewable
energy.
Patricia Nordstrom, Plug and Play’s corporate partnerships manager
in Asia Pacific, says it is looking for startups both within Souteast Asia and
globally, whether they are already working in hospitality or not, and at seed
stage to Series B in their funding.

Tech providers tend not to prioritize Southeast Asia.
Jason Lusk - ADB Ventures
“We are looking more at the technology. If there’s already a use
case for hotels, that’s a double win,” Nordstrom says.
“But if the technology is there and it’s not being utilized by
hotels, we may look at how the hotels and startups can co-build a new solution.”
Using Plug and Play’s existing innovation model, Travel Lab Asia
will select 20 startups - 10 to participate in an accelerator program beginning
in February and another 10 for the fall - that have solutions that address the
broad needs of the hotel partners.
Travel Lab Asia will also identify additional startups with
solutions suited to the unique needs of the individual hotel partners and
facilitate private deal flow sessions between those two entities.
The next steps
The group’s hope is to have about half a dozen pilot projects
underway in 2020.
To help the pilots materialize, ADB Ventures will provide grant
funding that Lusk says “at our discretion can be converted to equity in the startup’s
next round.”
“Ultimately that pilot
project will be proving the business case. We want these solutions to be able
to scale, and not just in places like Singapore, but in the developing countries
like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar that really have a tough time
attracting this kind of technical innovation,” Harper says.
“We’re trying to create very substantial
pilot project examples that can have deep impacts on the sustainable development
goals so then we can scale it across the hospitality sector.”
Lusk says he’s optimistic about the
potential for Travel Lab Asia to uncover effective solutions since it combines
the innovation experience of Plug and Play with the financing mechanism from ADB
Ventures, the broad industry networks of PATA and three corporate partners that
have a demonstrated commitment to sustainability.
“Tech providers tend not to prioritize Southeast
Asia. It’s easy to move into China, because you have a market of 1.3 billion people
and one political, cultural and economic context,” he says.
“So what we’re trying to do is to help industries in the region
articulate demand in a way that makes entering the region more attractive and more
feasible to technology providers, and then through our financing, de-risk that
market entry for the technology providers.”