Ethical is
in the name.

The name

Alorie was founded in Kuala Lumpur in 2011, at a point when speed and efficiency were most of what the industry measured. The name was chosen deliberately. In Sanskrit it means ethical, and the values under it are the ordinary ones — fairness, equality, learning, growth, creativity and originality — held to in a business where an adviser's incentives usually sit somewhere other than beside the owner's.

In practice that resolves into one principle: the operator and the owner should work as a single team, aiming at the same result. Not a management fee on one side and a return on the other, but one outcome that both are invested in. Everything below is a consequence of that.

Owners and operators as one team, invested in the same result.

It also sets the size of the firm. Alorie is deliberately small and senior. We take mandates we can staff with the people who won the work, and we bring in named specialists from a long network when a job needs one, for exactly as long as it needs them.

Where the experience comes from

Alorie is a small firm run by people who spent their careers inside large hotel groups, on the operating side. That is the whole basis of the advice: we have been the operator an owner was negotiating with, and we have opened and run the kind of property we are now asked to plan.

• Fourteen properties opened and operated with the Sunway Group.
• The Westin Kuala Lumpur delivered with Ireka, a FIABCI award winner.
• Centara's portfolio of twenty-two hotels in Thailand led, and the Cenvaree spa concept created inside it.
• Parkroyal Singapore operated.

Add to that four decades of opening hotels across Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the founder's own record, and the roster of finance, technical and commercial people around him. The people are listed on the homepage, with what each of them is accountable for.

Light on the land, in practice

Green hospitality is easy to write and hard to hold to, so we keep the list short and specific. These are the five things we advise on, and the five things an owner can hold us to, from the first site study through to the running hotel.

• Buy and hire locally. Purchasing seeks products and services of local origin where they are equivalent, and hotels hire local staff wherever the roles can be filled locally, with training put in to make that possible.
• Plan water to the site. Where the fresh water comes from, how much of it the property will actually use, and whether extraction, production or collection — or a mix — is the right answer for that place.
• Plan energy to the site. The power system chosen for the conditions and the fuel realistically available, and rooms designed for the sun path and the airflow so that comfort costs less to deliver.
• Handle waste properly. Solid waste sorted, composted and reused where it can be; fuel, oil and cooking oils handled correctly; sewage treated to a standard that leaves the ground and the water unaffected.
• Meet the law, then go past it where it counts. National and state environmental regulation is the floor. Where an independent certification such as Green Globe will mean something to guests and to lenders, we will say so and help pursue it — and where it would only decorate a brochure, we will say that instead.

Building materials, siting and the footprint on the land and the coastal zone are settled in the same conversation, because they are the decisions that cannot be revisited later.