According to some studies, up to 82% of travelers want to travel more sustainably, but if you’re used to luxury travel, sustainability and luxury might not seem to go together. Before giving up on planning your luxury vacation due to sustainability concerns, consider exploring these top hotels for sustainable luxury travel. By choosing a more eco-friendly destination, you can ensure a guilt-free trip without any worries. To ensure that you’re fully covered during your travels, it’s always a good idea to consider purchasing travel insurance.

Mandarin Oriental

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group operates 36 hotels in 24 countries and territories, including Bangkok, Jakarta, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Miami, and Abu Dhabi, among many others. The company has put sustainability at the forefront of its operations, infusing eco measures in its energy usage, hiring practices, and food service. But, guests would never know it based on the opulent experiences they continue to have.

Specifically, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group has completely eliminated single-use plastics from its properties. If you think about it, plastic isn’t all that luxurious in the first place and the replacement items, including refillable glass water bottles, wooden-handled toothbrushes, and refillable shampoo and conditioner bottles are significantly fancier than their plastic versions.

Patina Maldives

Located in the Fari Islands, Patina Maldives is a five-star resort that specifically targets “socially and environmentally conscious travellers.” The building itself is constructed of prefabricated PEFC-certified materials that were built away from the ecologically sensitive reefs that can easily be contaminated by construction. Rather than cut down trees to make room for the resort, the builders chose to relocate them to other parts of the islands.

The resort relies on solar power and low-energy LED lighting and has implemented processes and systems that allow it to recover approximately 50% of the energy it uses. For example, the HVAC system is set up to recover the heat from pumps and air conditioning units that can be converted to heat for the showers in the villas. The resort also has a rainwater collection system that collects and stores rainwater for use in landscaping.

Nayara Resorts

Eco-tourism is booming in Costa Rica and luxury travellers can get in on the action by staying at Nayara Resorts, a set of three interconnected properties near La Fortuna de San Carlos. The philosophy that Nayara Resorts follows is not only to have a negative impact on the environment, which is essentially what sustainability is all about but to also actively restore the environment to its previous state. This involves reforestation and local community investments. 

With the assistance of an Australian rainforest restoration landscape architect, the resorts have planted more than 20,000 trees and plants in the area. While these projects take longer to come to fruition than other examples given here, they have a long-term effect that is slowly reversing ecological damage. The resorts also have an on-site baby sloth sanctuary for the animals they occasionally find abandoned in the jungle and are home to a family of monkeys that adopted the resorts and their guests.

Luxury travel doesn’t have to be hard on the planet. By carefully choosing your hotels based on their sustainability efforts, you can have the best of both worlds.