Sustainability prize for the Stanglwirt...

A great honour for Stanglwirt host Balthasar Hauser. At the "Global Wellness Summit 2016", the Tyrolean pioneer in environmental hotel management was presented with the "Global Wellness Award" as a "Leader of Sustainability". The 70-year-old visionary did not miss the opportunity to collect the prize in person, along with his wife Magdalena Hauser: "Sustainability is something that is and always has been very close to the hearts of all our family. That's why I am particularly pleased to have won this award." In recent decades, Balthasar Hauser has converted the 400-year-old inn into a five-star Green Spa Resort.

The subject of sustainability has always played a key role in all his planning. He began to chart a visionary course right from the earliest days. Even when the hotel was being built, care was taken to ensure that only natural resources were used and the building was sustainably integrated into its surroundings. To supply the new wellness worlds with energy , the five-star hotel relies on natural mountain water from its own springs, heated by geothermal energy. An environmentally friendly heating system, powered by bark waste from nearby sawmills has been supplying the whole hotel complex with heat since the 1990s. The Green Spa Resort Stanglwirt also obtains 100% CO2-free eco-energy from a small hydroelectric power station in Tyrol, and has recently started a project with the environmental experts at the University of Natural Resources in Vienna (BOKU) to find out how the hotel can reduce its already small CO2 footprint even more. The Stanglwirt also supports BOKU with its transparent and sustainable CO2-offsetting projects, which are designed for the long term. These are just a few examples of how the Stanglwirt has been putting environmental protection into practice every day for decade after decade – and continues to find new areas to safeguard our planet.

The tenth "Global Wellness Summit" was held in Austria this year for the first time. In mid-October 2016, roughly 500 delegates from 45 different countries came to Kitzbühel for the most important international gathering of the wellness industry. Under the slogan "Back to the Future", around 50 speakers talked about the prospects for the flourishing spa and wellness sector.

The Global Wellness Summit is the most prestigious gathering in the world of senior managers from all areas of the wellness sector. They come together from the worlds of tourism, spas, education, beauty, fitness, nutrition, finance, the environment, medicine, architecture, workplace wellness, wellness communities and technology with a clear goal in mind: to ensure that the global wellness business – which is worth 3.7 billion dollars a year – continues to have a positive future.