Nora,
Yannick,
Irina
Hotel De Lindeboom:
One of the main places of energy consumption within the tourist industry is at the hotel. It needs to be heated, lit and meals should be cooked. On Texel the first hotel to make sustainability a priority was Hotel De Lindeboom. In 2002 they rearranged all rooms to be as eco-friendly as possible. They integrated a VRF system, a full functioning climate system for cooling and heating that makes individual adjustments possible. This gives a very high comfort combined with low energy use. The new key cards made it possible for light and heating to turn off when our guests leave the room.
In addition all the lights where replaced with LEDs. The showerheads and taps have been adjusted to save water without losing comfort. Most of the central heating pumps are now low energy users. The kitchen of the hotel has been upgraded with integrated cooling in the worktops. These also have the highest energy saving labels possible. The energy used in the hotels is supplied by Texel Energy, a local energy supplier.
They mainly use local suppliers for the ingredients in our hotel kitchens. The breakfast buffet contains, besides Fairtrade products, a wide range of fresh dairy products from Care Farm Novalishoeve. The bedlinnen in the hotel rooms and napkins in the restaurants are eco-friendly and Fairtrade. The laundry is handled by employees of sheltered workshop The Bolder on Texel.
All this means the hotel is very eco-friendly, but it also has a positive impact on the island economy. By choosing to use mostly locally grown they both reduce the ecological impact and stimulate the economy. They also try to keep tourists coming during the winter by advertising a lot, what means they can keep their staff year-round.
Texels Bierbrouwerij:
Since 1985 Harry Bonne had an hobbyist brewery. In 1994 he decided with a group friends to start their own brewery. In 1998 the brewery proved to be unprofitable, at that time they did not exactly know why. There were two options left, either they would downscale it back to an hobbyist brewery or they would need to extend the capacity. The rent of the brewery at that time would be too high for an hobbyist and an extension was no option either for the owners already managed a masonry. In 1998 they closed the brewery.
A restart was made in 1999. Things went quite well but in 2004 they were nearly bankrupt. The brewery was taken over by Mr. Diks and his companions. It was Diks who understood the mistakes that had been made in the years before. According to him the brewery had been focused too much on branding and selling their beer on the mainland from the beginning. The issue was that the beer had not even established its name on Texel itself. Their goals had in fact always been too high, they should have focused on the small goal of Texel first.
So Diks started focusing on the market of Texel. They wanted to gain the trust of the hotel and catering industry on the island. They did this by ensuring that the quality of their beer was high and steady. A constant quality was quite a struggle because they are always dependent on natural ingredients grown on the island. They succeeded because Harry Vermeer joined the team for two years. Vermeer had worked for 20 years in breweries and knew exactly how to give the beer an outstanding and constant quality. This is the way they gained the trust of the Texelaars and nowadays most supermarkets, bars, restaurants and cafes sell Texels. A second part of this success was the increase of popularity of special beers in the Netherlands. The surprising thing is that by only focusing on the market of the island the sale on the mainland also increased; in 2006 15 percent of the capacity was sold on the “overkant”.
To sum up, the success in both these cases mainly depends on their orientation towards Texel Island itself. Clever approach towards what is or can be available on the island and what image of the island it creates for residents and visitors are the key factors in these cases to establish the respect and trust connections. Therefore final sustainable intervention design has to consider and emphasize the importance of the value that it introduces to the image of the Texel Island and its residents.