Sustainable Tourism

Several of the collection's houses sit inside things worth protecting: thirty-three acres of standing forest above Gangtok, working tea gardens at Siliguri, a stretch of the Odisha coast where Olive Ridley turtles nest. In those places the environmental question is not abstract — it is the view from the window, and the reason guests came.

That shapes how the properties are run. Land is left as woodland rather than cleared for more rooms, lighting near nesting beaches is managed in season, and building work is kept to the footprint that already exists wherever it can be.

Water is the constraint that matters most across the Indian properties, and it is treated as one. Sewage treatment and the reuse of treated water for landscaping and cooling are standard across the larger houses, and rainwater harvesting is in place where the site and rainfall allow.

Guests are invited, not instructed, to reuse linen and towels. The choice is left with the guest and honoured either way.

The work here is unglamorous and effective: efficient lighting throughout, building management systems that stop empty rooms being cooled, heat recovery where the plant supports it, and maintenance regimes that keep equipment running near its rated efficiency rather than well below it.

Segregation at source, composting of kitchen waste where a property has the land for it, and the steady removal of single-use plastic from guest areas — bottles, straws, stirrers and amenity packaging — in favour of glass, refill and bulk dispensers.

Surplus prepared food is managed to reduce waste rather than routinely discarded.

Kitchens buy locally where the supply is good enough, which is most of the time and is also why the food tastes of where you are. Tea at Siliguri and Jungpana comes from the gardens the properties stand in.

The larger part of each property's staff is recruited from the district it operates in, and trained in-house. In several of these towns MAYFAIR is among the more significant employers, and hiring locally is the most direct contribution a hotel makes to the place it occupies.

This page carries no certifications, no percentages and no dated targets, because the group has not published audited figures and a hotel website is not the place to invent them.

When those numbers exist and have been verified, they will appear here with their scope and their date attached — which is the only form in which such a number means anything.