Heart Core Hotels is a collection of carefully selected luxury plant based eco boutique hotels that strive to set an example in an industry ripe for disruption. Meatless Movement recently had the opportunity to speak with the owners and founders, Gaby and Tony.
They told Meatless Movement that now is the time to create a Travel 2.0 experience that’s more sustainable, more mindful, more inclusive. It’s time to be kind – to ourselves, to each other and to our environment. It’s time to reach to our heart’s core, when traveling and beyond.
Please tell us more about yourselves
We believe traveling as a vegan you should be able to enjoy and get to know LOCAL flavors, ingredients and cuisines
Heart core hotels
We’re Gaby and Tony Aziz, a Los Angeles based husband and wife duo behind the travel start up Heart Core Hotels – boutique eco luxury hotels entirely powered by plants. Before founding Heart Core Hotels we ran a non-profit online hotel booking site Rooms for Change, which came to a standstill with the pandemic.
So what’s Heart Core Hotels all about?
We’re here to help you with the travel part
Heart core hotels
Our story, as most brands out there, starts with an unfulfilled need as a customer. As lifelong travelers and hotel lovers ourselves, we couldn’t quite find a hotel brand that would tick all of the boxes for us. So we decided to build one! We wanted to create a collection of smaller hotels that would meet what we call our THREE (HEART) CORE VALUES:
- to be the antidote to large cookie cutter resorts and genuinely care about sustainability (we say a firm no to “greenwashing” in tourism),
- to offer plentiful plant based food options and highlight local ingredients and cuisines (we’re mostly plant based ourselves and we believe food is the fastest way to the heart of any culture),
- to democratize travel by providing a welcoming environment to Guests of all backgrounds, not just the stereotypical traveler (we call it #TheNewAllInclusive).
KIND IS THE NEW COOL
Heart core hotels
The tagline of Heart Core Hotels is Kind is the new Cool. There are so many trendy design hotels out there, and we really respect them, but as customers we somehow always got a feeling that caring for the local environment, our planet, and for each other, was an afterthought. We are on a mission to prove that eco/vegan and luxury/hip are not mutually exclusive ideas.
Our first location on the Big Island of Hawai’i – Volcano Eco Retreat – has been a phenomenal success (we are so proud to be Hawaii’s first and only fully vegan hotel!) and a great proof of concept. We’re very excited to be opening new locations in the near future, watch this space!
Why start a vegan business?
Because we need more people eating more plants NOW.
heart core hotels
First and foremost, it goes with our Core Value of sustainability. We really wanted to encourage Guests to “eat outside their comfort zone” when traveling. Anyone can eat plant based for a few days while on vacation, right? Especially when the food is delicious enough that you don’t even miss meat! We are not all going to go vegan overnight, we are not even fully vegan ourselves, that’s not the point.
The point is to – at a global scale – start treating animal protein as a special weekly treat instead of a default daily choice. Let’s reverse it and make veggies the main dish, not a side dish. It’s not about a thousand people turning vegan cold turkey, it’s about a billion people doing Meatless Monday. Then Tuesday, then Wednesday.
Our breakfast is bound to satisfy even the most demanding omnivores
heart core hotels
So many of our Guests had never heard of Meatless Monday, let alone about eating plant based, and now they are willing to give it a try! We’re very thrilled to have planted that seed of curiosity in them. Which is why we don’t actually target our marketing channels at travelers who are already vegan or vegetarian, but at everyone else. In fact, over 90% of our Guests to date have been meat eaters.
While we love every single one of our Guests, and we’ve made vegan vacations easier for so many people, we’re not in the business of preaching to the choir. We’re here to serve mouth watering tofu scramble and eggplant bacon (shout out to the amazing Chef Court!) to a Guest who would otherwise have ordered eggs and bacon as they know it. And having them ask for a recipe afterwards is the best compliment we could ask for.
That’s how you cultivate change. One seed of curiosity at a time. One Heart Core plant based breakfast at a time.
What do you want to achieve as a brand?
Our hotels make a genuine effort to reduce their footprint in daily operations and aim to inspire guests to acquire new green habits during their stay
Heart core hotels
While we had been toying around with the idea for the brand for a longer while, the final push to make it happen were the George Floyd protests. We wanted to do our part in spreading kindness and tolerance, and doing it through travel was the best we knew how. (#KindIsTheNewCool has so many dimensions for us). Everyone told us starting a travel brand in the middle of the pandemic was crazy but we listened to our hearts – which is why we called it Heart Core Hotels.
And we haven’t regretted it for a second. Precisely because of the pandemic, travelers are now seeking smaller, more boutique properties which respect the environment and allow them to be at one with nature.
Going back to building tolerance through travel, we’re soon launching our sister non profit: Heart Core Fund. We have been donating a portion of the Heart Core Hotels profits (and running personal birthday fundraisers) to fund trip scholarships for disadvantaged youth and seniors who never traveled before. Having traveled across 6 continents we have witnessed first hand the transformational power of travel in bringing people together, bridging intercultural gaps, building cross-border friendships and broadening horizons. We’re combining our passions for both travel and world cuisines.
The mission of Heart Core Fund is to enable kids from different backgrounds to literally sit together at one table and perhaps teach each other about their traditional foods. Plant based, of course😉 “Build a longer table, not a taller fence” is our motto. We are currently planning our first trip for 2023 so stay tuned.
We just wanted to say THANK YOU
IKE– The world is what you think it is
heart core hotels
We’d love to thank the Hawaiian people for welcoming us into their community, despite all of the challenges that the tourism and travel industry has brought on the islands historically. We couldn’t be more thankful for the support and more humbled to be the stewards of the incredibly complex Hawai’i culture and its fragile habitat.
We would also love to thank the new managers of our Big Island location – Emily & Court, who have been an absolute blessing. They came into our lives through a beautiful stroke of serendipity, and quit their secure Google jobs in Bay Area to be a part of this little known vegan travel start up! We love them dearly, and we’re so excited for everyone who’s thinking of booking their stay at Volcano Eco Retreat. Both Court and Emily are professionally trained plant based chefs and they’ve been cooking up quite a vegan storm. You’re in for a real treat!
Unforgettable customer service stories
Where guests of all backgrounds, races and beliefs can thrive, meet like minded travelers and create lasting travel memories, discrimination free
heart core hotels
So many! Truthfully, each and every one of our Guests have been so unique and brought with them their own story. That’s what we are most proud of – building a brand that attracts a certain type of a traveler. But the stories that motivate us the most are of people who can’t imagine a meal with no meat in it, and end up loving our hotel and leaving inspired to eat meatless!
One couple told us it was the first time in their travels that they encountered a hotel breakfast with no bacon and that our garbanzo avocado toast was better than bacon 🙂 We had a couple who start their day at home with steak and eggs every day of the week (!), yet they were the first ones who ended up booking a stay with us AGAIN, precisely because they couldn’t get enough of our vegan breakfasts! Our very first repeat Guest was the most hard core (heart core?😉 ) meat eater- we could hardly believe it!
We also had quite a few Guests who didn’t realize they booked a vegan hotel, as some online booking sites don’t allow us to edit the description. A few have been apprehensive at first but then ended up loving their food and their overall experience. A few others never even realized that we are a vegan property, and ended up praising our “delicious eggs”. We have so many more stories like that! We never really set out to do it consciously, but ended up gently nudging Guests to question the status quo, which is what it’s all about.
Why are meatless diets on the rise?
Travel is a privilege that’s often taken for granted
heart core hotels
As a global population we are more concerned about health – our own and that of our planet. Covid has exposed so many vulnerabilities of both and motivated us to take greater care of what we put on our plates. Not only to keep ourselves nourished, healthy and immune to diseases but also to demonstrate the newly gained recognition that we are all connected. Which inevitably goes hand in hand with the concept of travel. What we consume in the so called “Northern Hemisphere” or “The West” has great repercussions on the entire habitats and populations throughout the rest of the world. At Heart Core Hotels we want to promote responsible, mindful travel, and respect for the communities we visit. That clearly starts before we even book a vacation.
We hope the effect of this newly gained awareness won’t be short lived and that we’ll continue to acknowledge that every time we replace a meat dish with a plant based alternative we’re making an enormous difference. As the great author Michael Pollan once told Oprah in an interview, “when it comes to food, three times a day you get to express your values”. We couldn’t agree more, and through Heart Core Hotels we are on a mission to help people do that while on vacation.
Misconceptions about vegans
We believe traveling as a vegan you should be able to enjoy and get to know LOCAL flavors, ingredients and cuisines
heart core hotels
You’ve probably heard it all by now (“where do you get your protein from?” lol), so we’ll focus on the travel context. There is usually a worry among vegan and vegetarian travelers that they won’t find enough veggie friendly options while on the road, or at their hotel. That’s a myth as these days you can easily find plentiful vegan and vegetarian foods pretty much anywhere.
What does present a challenge, however, is finding vegan and vegetarian foods that are wholesome, nutritious AND based on LOCAL ingredients and recipes. You can eat that tomato pasta or that veggie burger anywhere in the world. We are strong advocates that eating what’s traditional at each destination is an inseparable (perhaps even most important) part of your travel experience. It’s the best way to demonstrate curiosity and deep respect for the local way of life. As for the meat eating travelers out there, opting for veggie options while on vacation is usually completely outside of their comfort zone. They simply don’t know where to even start.
How do we educate or explain? For example, at our Hawaii location we educate by preparing delicious (or so we’ve been told!🙂 ) local plant based food for our Guests and talking to them about what inspired each recipe, what Hawaiian ingredients we used, how they grow, what are the challenges. (And there are many as 90% of Hawaii produce is imported). Guests have so far been very receptive and engaged with those conversations. Many of them later went out and sought out those foods at farmers markets and mom’n’pop restaurants (instead of familiar corporate chains), further supporting the local economy, interacting with Hawaiian people and thus creating a positive cycle of tourism that gives back to the community.
Be kind, be loving, be pono, live in the present
heart core hotels
As far as we know we are the world’s very first (and only) vegan hotel collection, and we’re so proud to lead the way and to prove those who doubted our gut feeling wrong. We know the travel industry is ready, and we’re hoping to start a new long lasting travel trend, or at least a conversation!
all images courtesy of Heart Core Hotels