Sun, sand and SUSTAINABILITY
Soneva founder Sonu Shivdasani remains true to the ideals he and his wife vowed to uphold when they first fell in love with the Maldives.
Mention the Maldives to most people and they will think of idyllic luxury resorts built over brilliant aquamarine waters. But it wasn’t always so.
Once a sleepy collection of Indian Ocean islands and atolls with an economy dependent on fishing, the Maldives only arrived on the radar of international tourists in the 1970s. Today it is home to 132 resorts that welcomed over 1.5 million visitors last year.
Before it became a go-to destination for the jet set, the country was frequented mainly by mid-market travellers. Luxury resorts were nowhere to be found.
That was what Sonu Shivdasani and his wife Eva discovered back in the early 1990s when they first visited and fell in love with the islands. The couple decided that they wanted to build a home there.
However, the law presented a roadblock. Even though the government allowed islands to be leased, it mandated that they be leased mostly to hotel and resort developers.
The only way the couple could have a home in the country they fell in love with was to build a hotel. And that was exactly what they did. Soneva, drawing on the first names of both founders, was ready to see the light of day.
Still, funding the venture was problematic. Not until Mr Shivdasani took over a Bangkok-based hotel management company called Pavilion Management and secured funding from Thai banks was he able to open his first hotel Soneva Fushi — and a home, of course — in 1995.
From the start, the couple were passionate about suitability — even before sustainability was in vogue. Hotels in the Maldives at the time were known for plastic chairs, neon lights and other jarring decor that didn’t exactly harmonise with coconut palms and whitesand beaches. The Shivdasanis decided then and there that they didn’t want to build a mass-market hotel.
In an interview with Mr Shivdasani recalls that from the beginning, Soneva’s business ethos was simple: combining luxury and sustainability. A quarter of a century later, the philosophy remains unchanged. The couple remain committed to leading the hospitality industry in environmentally responsible tourism.
“Sustainability is part of our DNA. We’ve been talking about sustainability since we opened back in 1995. So our purpose hasn’t changed. It wasn’t very fashionable then and people thought what we were doing was quite odd,” says the 55-year-old hotelier.
Starting with zero hotel experience, the couple built 42 villas and a spa — an unusual addition at that time. The founders, favouring an environmentally responsible lifestyle, focused on low-volume, high-quality patrons. Soneva Fushi was the first “castaway” resort in the Maldives.
The success of their first enterprise was followed by Soneva Kiri on Koh Kood in Trat province of Thailand in 2009 and Soneva Jani in the Noonu Atoll in the Maldives in 2016. Along the way, the couple also founded two other brands, Evason and Six Senses, both of which became global success stories.
Then in 2012 Mr Shivdasani decided instead to devote his full attention to Soneva, and sold Six Senses to the US-based private equity firm Pegasus Capital Advisors. Six Senses, which now operates 11 luxury resorts and 29 spas in 20 countries, was sold last year to the multinational hospitality company InterContinental Hotels Group.
Since parting with Six Senses, the Shivdasanis’ focus has been on being both the owners and operators of their resorts, channeling all their energies into nurturing Soneva.
SUSTAINABLE HOSPITALITY
Sustainability is a purpose that goes beyond a business objective, says Mr Shivdasani, who believes that businesspeople can have a great positive impact on the world by making changes to the way they do business.
In the case of Soneva, that means offering guests luxury while minimising impact on the planet and enhancing their health — the guiding principle known as “intelligent luxury”.
In his view, the “intelligent luxury” philosophy is all about knowing what luxury means for each guest, most of whom live in cities. For many, being close to nature is a luxury they can’t normally find in their day-to-day existence in an urban environment.
For example, Soneva started to measure all of the ecological impacts of the business and introduced a mandatory carbon levy, under which all guests pay a 2% surcharge on their bills. That 2% since 2008 has raised roughly US$7 million, all of which has been given back to society through various projects undertaken by the Soneva Foundation, he says.
The foundation has used the funds to plant half a million trees in northern Thailand, develop a windmill in southern India, and efficient cooking stoves in Myanmar and Darfur. The stoves reduce the need for wood burning and curb indoor toxic emissions, thus improving health and the environment.
Taking sustainability to another level, Soneva banned branded water on its properties. Every guest is given a glass bottle when they arrive to use and refill. This is both sustainable and profitable.
“The cost of (water) sales went from 20% down to 2%. It didn’t affect our profitability,” says Mr Shivdasani. “We have had very little pushback. There’s a big ecological benefit and a big financial saving which went to help a lot of people around the world.”
As the CEO and joint creative director of Soneva, he likes to call himself “Guardian of the Culture” — a title that suits his mission — he is driven to create a culture and drive behaviour.
His business ethos lies in trying to create a values-driven organisation where people come to work and feel engaged and passionate because they have a sense of purpose. That is essentially what what drives and motivates people, in his view.
“By having a purpose that goes beyond paying employees a salary, it engages them; they’re passionate about what we do. They’re passionate about coming to work every morning and being part of Soneva.”
To be the boss of more than 1,000 employees, he believes the key is to create a philosophy and values that can drive behaviour. It also means ensuring that people in the organisation are upholding and maintaining those values, and speaking the right language that drives positive behaviour.
As a CEO, Mr Shivdasani believes that one should always be creative, open-minded and a good listener. That way, one can get the best out of one’s teams.
“People say I’m very creative and we’re very creative as a company,” he says. “But a lot of that creativity comes from just listening to one’s employees and giving them an opportunity to come up with creative ideas.”
Business has always been in the family blood, though becoming a hotelier was not part of the original plan for Mr Shivdasani. Born in England into a privileged background, he is the youngest son of Indoo Shivdasani, who created one of the largest Indian private fortunes in the world as a trader in west Africa, India and Europe.
Raised in the UK and schooled at Eton College and then Le Rosey in Switzerland, young Sonu went to Oxford to study English Literature. It was during his time in Oxford that he met his Swedish-born wife, Eva, through his sister.
Upon graduation, he spent some time helping his elder brother Azad manage the family empire that he had been overseeing since their father’s death in 1979. But after two years, Sonu decided he wanted to strike out on his own. Inspired by Eva’s creativity and passion for sustainability, he set his sights on creating hotels that would stand out from the crowd. Evason was their first venture, followed by Six Senses and Soneva.
The ensuing three decades have brought considerable business success, not to mention the personal fulfillment that comes with living on a paradise island.
LEARNING FROM CRISIS
But Mr Shivdasani’s life changed completely in October 2018 when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma. The experience taught him to reprioritise things in life, helping him emerge with a renewed sense of purpose. The cancer is now in remission, he wrote in a recent essay on the future of post-Covid travel for Lifestyle Asia.
“To some extent, many of us in the midst of the current coronavirus crisis are adjusting to a new reality and going through a similar grief cycle (as cancer patients experience),” he wrote. “There is an emptiness, an uncomfortable feeling. We miss our daily routine. In a way, we are grieving the loss of the way we used to live in the past.
“But on the other hand, this crisis has allowed many people the opportunity to pause and rethink their values, priorities.”
His mission in life has shifted and now he wishes to spend his time to “help others help themselves and to to leave the world in a better place”, he tells
Asia Focus.
“I’m focusing on how we can continually improve, not just ourselves as an organisation or our business, but how we can have a positive impact on society and what impact we are having with our actions.”
Having gone through a life-changing personal crisis, Mr Shivdasani is undaunted by the challenge that the pandemic has placed in the way of the global economy and tourism. He remains an optimist, believing the hospitality industry will bounce back more quickly than expected.
“I think tourists will start to travel. But we need to establish a new norm,” he says. “It will be a slow recovery. So you’ll have an initial bounce to say 60-80% [of normal levels] and then over two years, I think we’ll get back to 100%. Even though it depends from market to market, I think he will bounce back quicker.”
Even though the pandemic has devastated the hospitality and tourism industry, he still sees a silver lining. Citing Lao Tzu’s adage, “Good fortune has its roots in disaster”, he points out that crisis brings about an opportunity to learn and develop.
“There’s always an opportunity to personally enrich oneself from a crisis in terms of self,” says Mr Shivdasani. “[On a business level] we’ve been badly impacted but so many other industries have also been seriously impacted. It’s very difficult; we’ve had to cut back costs. We’ve tried our hardest to maintain our values and our best employee goals.”
For Soneva to stay afloat during the crisis, he says management is looking at every cost and re-examining the way they do things.
“We’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned some best practices that we will make sure to keep and maintain even after the crisis,” he says. “Some of these ideas and best practices will be utilised next year when the hospitality business experiences its usual slowdowns during the low season.”
We’ve been talking about sustainability since we opened back in 1995 … It wasn’t very fashionable then and people thought what we were doing was quite odd
People say I’m very creative and we’re very creative as a company. But a lot of that creativity comes from just listening to one’s employees and giving them an opportunity to come up with creative ideas