By Adam Mogelonsky and Larry Mogelonsky
Regenerative tourism and stewardship are now mainstream. They are both buzz terms and hugely profitable ventures for those hotels and resorts that put in the blood, sweat and tears to set up the programs up properly.
Without burying the lead, for hotel brands and owners, agrobiodiversity is a niche way to create exceptional guest experiences, especially in luxury, and drive demand or ADR uplift.
In today’s world of endless brand expansions and the explosion of luxury hotels, guests yearn for places that are offering more than just beach access. They want exclusivity and are willing to pay more for it: exclusive access to historic sights, private excursions to remote destinations or, in this case, the ability to taste unique, esoteric foods.
The Next Step for Regenerative Tourism
But there’s another step that hotels can take, one that’s both noble and also barely understood outside of small groups of ecology or climate science circle.
And because few are engaged with it, that means there’s tremendous potential for hotel product differentiation to drive ADR, ancillaries and overall business value.
This is agrobiodiversity, and it will become increasingly important as climate resiliency efforts become more common. Agrobiodiversity involves the planning efforts to shift away from monocropping which is both a major contributor to carbon emissions as well as putting us at risk for superbug-born famines or crop collapse events.
The revenue opportunity for hotels is to support food crop resiliency through agrobiodiversity as a method to ramp up a brand’s regenerative cachet, heighten the availability of locally sourced nutritious foods and create culinary, wellness or agricultural experiences that sell.
What Is Agrobiodiversity?
A clinical definition of this term is increasing the variety of food crops grown, both within a species by using heirloom cultivars or landraces and by farming different edible species that are either highly regional or not commonly known at the supermarket.
This definition is often confused with ingredient diversity. As an example, a tropical fruit salad may comprise a high ingredient count with shredded coconut, papaya, pineapple, mango, dragon fruit and kiwi. But at the end of the day, those fruits have more or less the same genetics whether they are purchased in New York, Cape Town or Bangkok.
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