If one thing is going to be hard to decarbonise, it’s a holiday. Don’t peek under the rug of airline emissions, because it’s not a pleasant sight, and then you’re looking at Mediterranean resorts with all-night lighting and karaoke, plus the fact that when you get into your hotel or Airbnb, you want hot water and you want it now.
Holidays, at least as we have come to know them, have big carbon footprints.
Well, perhaps not, or at least not all. There is at least one location in Ireland that has done enough to erase and offset its own carbon emissions. And it is now looking at doing the same for your emissions getting there and back.
Ballygarry Hotel and Spa, just outside Tralee, is a large, sweeping house which was once the home of the Lawlor family before becoming a hotel, then called The Manhattan, in the 1950s. It looks exactly like the kind of stately home you’d take one glance at and assume it’s murder to heat.
The 24-hour working cycles of hotels surely can’t help with that. And yet ... According to Ballygarry’s manager, Padraig McGillicuddy – grandson of one of the founders of The Manhattan – the hotel is pretty well emissions-free as it stands. And it all started with plastic bottles.
“I could have done nothing,” McGillicuddy tells The Irish Times. “I could still throw out big compactors’ worth of landfill to be buried in the local dump every month. If I wished, I could still have plastic bottles in my bedrooms. But, instead, we’ve saved more than 450,000 plastic bottles from landfill because we went for continuous, not single-use, plastics.
“From that, we planted 30,000 trees. We had the land to do it, which helped. We’re now making plans for a solar farm. We did our integrated constructed wetlands. We’ve our own bees on site – everything.”
McGillicuddy estimates that, in 2019, running the hotel produced 462 tonnes of carbon emissions. By 2024 it was down to zero, audited by Fáilte Ireland. That figure includes a certain amount of carbon offsetting but before offsetting sceptics reach for their commenting keyboard, the hotel’s sprawling grounds mean that, while originally a commercial offsetting service was used, the hotel now offsets the carbon it has to emit with its own trees on its own grounds.
Next on the list is everything and everyone that comes to visit and work at the hotel.
“What we’re doing now is to analyse our Scope 3 emissions,” says McGillicuddy, referring to emissions coming from sources not directly owned or controlled by an organisation but which occur upstream or downstream in its supply chain.
“Now we’re where we’ve got to analyse the guy who delivers the sausages, and the guy who takes away the dirty linen. So now we’re starting that process. That will bring our carbon emissions back up, of course, but we’ll offset it with the 30,000 trees, the reed-bed filtration and the solar farm. If we can get that over the line, all of that will offset the carbon we produce.
“So our ultimate aim is, by 2030, to be able to offset the travel time of our staff and guests to and from work, and we think we’ll have a carbon-neutral hotel in our Scope 3 emissions as well.”
McGillicuddy is – like myself – a dyed-in-the-wool car enthusiast, who counts a classic Ford Mustang and a Corvette among his treasured possessions. But he was also in on the ground floor not only in accommodating those guests showing up with an electric car, but in actively courting such business.
The idea is that no traffic with a reciprocating engine is allowed beyond the hotel car park, and so we’re going to have off-the-grid tourism. You check in like a regular guest but then you’re taken to the cabin by electric golf-cart ... And you just switch off
— Padraig McGillicuddy
“We were the third ever installation of a Tesla supercharger in Ireland,” says McGillicuddy. “Certainly, we were the first hotel to have supercharging. When we had our first slow chargers on-site, they would charge a car at 4.7kW. Now, the supercharger can do that at 250kW. They’re the newest chargers in the country right now, and they have the tap-and-go facility so you don’t even have to have the app – we’re just getting that function turned on right now.”
Allowing people to charge on site is one thing, but McGillicuddy is now tailoring the hotel’s services around EV charging. “If you use the supercharger, it’s a 40-minute charging window” says McGillicuddy. “And we noticed that the average turnaround for a table in our brasserie was 35 minutes.
“So we figured we could actually get someone to plug in, charge, have a meal and actually enjoy the whole thing. So we have a little sign up by the chargers which offers you the chance to enjoy a snack, or a quick lunch, or a takeaway coffee. It’s all promoting the sale, if you like, but it’s also about the culture more than just the sale.”
McGillicuddy boxed smart with the charging. While opinions may differ on Elon Musk and Tesla right now, the supercharger service is second to none, and all it cost was the space – Tesla installed and maintains the chargers, meaning that the hotel didn’t have to worry about getting sufficient power to the site to run the chargers.
Which is just as well as, according to McGillicuddy: the four supercharger connectors in the car park can draw down as much power – 250kVa [kilovolt-amps] – as the entire hotel, including “every hot tub, sauna, and steam room running at full tilt”.
If that all sounds a bit frantic – scoffing a 35-minute lunch while your battery tops up – McGillicuddy has a rather gentler way of having a minimum carbon break. Out in the grounds of the estate, amid landscaped grass that comes up to your chest, is a series of individual cabins.
“We have 180 acres around us” says McGillicuddy. “The idea is that no traffic with a reciprocating engine is allowed beyond the hotel car park, and so we’re going to have off-the-grid tourism. You check in like a regular guest, but then you’re taken to the cabin by electric golf-cart, and the cabins are all sunk into this tall grass. And you just switch off. When you’re down there in the mornings, there’s just a symphony of bird song; it’s really beautiful.”
These cabins will draw their power – once planning permissions hurdles are jumped – from the estate’s solar farm, and even the waste is dealt with in the most eco-friendly way possible.
“The waste out of the cabins, like the hotel, goes into an integrated constructed wetlands” says McGillicuddy. “There are four two-acre ponds, and the water filters through the ponds and through the reed-beds that grow in them.
“We’ve had this in operation for five years, and it’s been a massive success. Basically the water and waste from the bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms – it all flows into these ponds with reed beds and so goes through filtration and evaporation, and there are bugs and natural bacteria which eat up all of it. It passes through four ponds to exit to a sampling chamber that goes to the lab every month, and has passed every single month five years – pure water.”
It’s a tempting prospect. Swoosh down in your electric car. Hook up to a handy charger. Go and spend a few nights among the grass and the birds, and all the while your, er, “leavings” are being dealt with by Mother Nature. That sure sounds more appealing – in every respect, including environmental – than Ryanair to Magaluf.
