Aquacity nominated for top travel award

AquaCity resort, Europe’s leading eco-friendly spa and water park, has been shortlisted for a British Guild of Travel Writers Overseas Tourism Award and is through to the final round of voting by members of the Guild. The Award will be announced at the Guild’s annual dinner at London’s Savoy Hotel on Sunday 11th November 2007.

Despite being located in an economically poor region of northern Slovakia, AquaCity is achieving worldwide recognition for its use of green technology to minimise its carbon footprint and create an affordable, green tourist destination.

AquaCity uses freely available, renewable, natural resources to heat and power its two hotels, conference and leisure centre, bars, restaurant, gyms, spa and water park. This saves around 27 tons of C02 emissions each day, compared with a conventionally powered resort burning fossil fuels, and around 3 million euros each year in fuel costs.

To ensure the resort is accessible to all, and not a green initiative that’s exclusive to the moneyed or privileged, the cost savings are ploughed back into subsidising the entrance to the spa and water park, enabling local, domestic and foreign visitors to enjoy standards of luxury and leisure that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

Profits are also invested in developing further eco-friendly facilities, such as the solar powered `Blue Sapphire’ swimming pool complex, which opened in July 2007, using photo-cells in the façade to heat and power the pools and showers and generate energy to power AquaCity’s vast heat pumps.

These in turn draw thermal energy from geothermal water, AquaCity’s prime energy source, drilled from a deep, subterranean lake, a few kms from AquaCity.

As well as addressing global conservation concerns, AquaCity’s social conscience starts far closer to home. The resort is the major employer in the former socialist town of Poprad, directly employing 1,000 locals, indirectly providing work for many times that number.

Subsidised facilities provide local schoolchildren with the opportunity to learn to swim and local families with swimming and leisure facilities that were previously way beyond their reach. The owner’s organic farm provides meat for AquaCity’s kitchens, produce is sourced locally wherever possible and food miles are minimised.

AquaCity’s British based owner, Czech businessman Jan Telensky is clear in his objective, to demonstrate the future of tourism must be to find alternative energy sources.

“The travel industry should do far more than just pay lip service to climate change. Many companies adopt the `green’ badge for marketing purposes that simply have no depth or foundation to them.

“To ensure sustainability and growth, travel companies need to look at ways of conserving energy and natural resources by investing in alternative energy sources and by educating their staff and customers in comprehensive environmental best practice.

“They need to recognise that being green can be highly profitable. If it wasn’t for the savings we make at AquaCity by using freely available power sources, we wouldn’t be able to offer such high standards at such competitive prices. We’ve created a resort that the average person simply couldn’t afford without the use of green technology to power it”.

For information about AquaCity visit Aquacityresort.com.