The Man Who Changed How I Look at Hotels

I did not enter the hospitality sector by design. I walked into it through a conversation.

That conversation was with Param Kannampilly at the Orchid Hotel Mumbai, a place that, at that time, was already being spoken of as India’s first “ecotel.” This was in 1997. I remember less about the formalities of the meeting and more about the insistence in his voice. He spoke not of rooms, tariffs, or occupancy, but of systems, water loops, energy baselines, waste streams.

But what stayed with me were not the systems alone. It was the way he translated them into decisions, small, almost invisible choices that quietly redefined hospitality.

The Entry Point: “Good Earth Keeping”

That initial interaction led to something tangible – a joint conference we organised in 1997 on Good Earth Keeping. I came up with this phrase and Param simply loved it. The phrase sounded simple, almost quaint. But the intent was not. We created for the participants a CD ROM that had a knowledge base of facts and stories of green hotels across the world. Orchid sponsored it courtesy Param.

Hotels, as Param saw them, were condensed or mini-cities. They consumed water like small towns, generated waste like neighbourhoods, and ran energy systems continuously. Hotels were managed more as aesthetic experiences. Param argued that sustainability could and should be demonstrated and experienced.

Param brought nine hotels around the Mumbai domestic airport together. Each contributed one rupee per room, every day. The pooled amount was used to compost kitchen waste generated across these hotels. The compost, in turn, was used in the gardens of the same hotels. This was done almost three decades ago.

There was no grand announcement around this.

Sustainability does not always need scale. It needs alignment.

The Discipline of Small Decisions

There was another side to Param’s thinking – almost meticulous, sometimes counterintuitive.

He once spoke about something as trivial as sugar on the tables.

Sugar sachets, he said, are a design failure. Once torn, they become a useless piece of waste -light, scattered, and difficult to recover. His solution was simple: shift back to sugar cubes.

No announcement. No branding. Just a quiet redesign.

The same thinking extended to what many hotels consider a gesture of hospitality – fruit baskets wrapped in plastic, placed in every room. His view was blunt: most guests do not consume them. The result is predictable – food waste and plastic waste, both unnecessary.

What replaced it was not austerity, but choice.

A small note in the room: “If you would like fruits, we are available 24×7. Please let us know.”

This is where his thinking diverged from the mainstream. He was not reducing hospitality. He was redefining it—from display to responsiveness.

When Sustainability Became a Conversation

One of the most unusual ideas I encountered at Orchid was embedded quietly inside the room.

There was a button – at least it used to be.

Next to it, a note: “If you commit to sustainability, press this.”

Pressing it would increase the room temperature by two degrees over the next two hours.

At first glance, it seemed like a behavioural experiment. And in many ways, it was.

Some guests pressed it out of curiosity. Some out of conviction. Some, quite practically, pressed it and stepped out for breakfast, postponing the consequence.

But the real design was revealed only at checkout.

The cashier would mention that the guest had participated in an energy-saving initiative. Because of that small action, the hotel had saved energy, translating into actual cost savings. And then came the unexpected part: 50% of that saving was shared back with the guest.

Along with it, a quiet acknowledgment and a promise to stay connected through a newsletter.

This was not charity. It was not messaging. It was a reframing – making sustainability material, measurable, and shared.”

Looking back, it explains something else that numbers alone do not – the unusually high repeat customer rate at Orchid in those days.

The guest was not just staying. The guest was participating.

I don’t know if Orchid still operates such a program today after Param’s departure.

By then, I had begun to look at hotels differently in all my travels across the world. I wore a sustainability lens during my stays.

In all these cases, I realized that low water fixtures did not draw special attention of the customers and neither the waste recycling happening in the backyard. Energy choices  made were silent.

This raised an uncomfortable question. If sustainability is invisible, does it get valued? Or does it quietly slip into marketing language?

Param would probably have resisted that framing. For him, the test was not visibility. It was integrity.

The Fern  : Movement He Built

Param went on to build the The Fern Hotels & Resorts after his work on Ecotel at Orchid under the banner of Concept Hospotality. He attempted something more ambitious than a single property. He tried to institutionalise the idea of environmentally sensitive hospitality.

The article in Hotelier India captures parts of this journey. But profiles often catalogue achievements. They do not capture the texture of thinking.

The last I saw Param was at the “Sustainability Summit & Awards 2025” , an event that was held on 16 December 2025 at the Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai. Param received the Lifetime Achievement Award. I too was awarded generously for my sustainability related contributions. I saw him aged. While he looked frail, he braved and stood by himself on the dais and shared his thoughts. Few words of wisdom and the same voice with passion.

We must have met with a gap of 25 years! He smiled when I told him that I had stayed at the Fern in Vadodara. “Was everything OK?” he asked me warmly.

A Closing Thought

It is tempting to write about green hotels as a category – certifications, technologies, benchmarks. But that would miss the point.

What I saw in Param’s work was not a framework. It was a way of thinking – one that questioned default choices, however small they appeared.

A rupee a room. A cube instead of a sachet. A note instead of a fruit basket. A button that turned sustainability into a shared transaction.

None of these would dominate a sustainability report.

Yet, taken together, they represent something far more difficult – the discipline to act differently, even when no one is watching.

If there is a tribute to be written, it is perhaps this:

He did not just build green hotels.

He changed the terms on which hospitality engages with responsibility and made the guest a part of that equation.

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