“The vision here is to bring awareness outside of Siem Reap town and to bring livelihood opportunities to another region of Cambodia. We have started a massive reforestation project and the mission is to regenerate the land and create a mix of not-for-profit and commercial projects,” shared Koulmandas. Aside from hotels and residential properties, Song Saa Reserve will also have a hospitality training centre, learning centre and other conservation initiatives.
Here, Koulmandas shares more insights on the evolution of sustainable and regenerative tourism, the changing definition of luxury and her journey in hospitality entrepreneurship.
A decade ago, Song Saa Private Island pioneered the idea of sustainable tourism. How do you think sustainable tourism has changed over the years? What does Song Saa do differently?
When we opened 10 years ago, no one bothered that we had no single use plastics and no plastics straws. So if we use that as a benchmark, it has changed. But the travel industry is a bit of a dinosaur. There’s so much innovation in so many other industries, but the hotel industry is slowly catching up. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a real shift, which is great to see.
But I think the idea of sustainability is not enough. We need a monumental shift in the way we live our lives, and regenerative tourism is a huge part of that. Sustainability looks to do less harm while regenerative tourism is the design and development of interventions and initiatives that contribute to the evolution of larger systems. We can’t look at our hotel in isolation. We need to look at systems around where the hotel is located. How does the local community live? How does the environment thrive? Where is the degradation?
Song Saa was founded on the story of regenerating a small island and dying reef system and has been engaging in regenerative tourism for over 10 years. This means that we have had to deeply understand our place in order to uniquely contribute to it. We continue to do this by engaging with collective intelligence – from each other, from science through the Song Saa Foundation and so on.
