Immediate concerns should not prevent us from taking a long-term perspective. Our recent meeting of the Board of Directors and NACE Council in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 12 March was an excellent opportunity to review the challenges of the past few months and discuss our plans for the months ahead. It was also an opportunity to get to know our hosts - our new Members, the Bulgarian Hospitality Management Club and the Bulgarian Hotel & Restaurant Association - who gave us a wonderful welcome. In fact, our meeting acted as a magnet for the hospitality associations in the region with participants arriving from Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a result, I am delighted to report that IH&RA has now welcomed these Balkan professionals into membership.

At our meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, I showed a presentation on Climate Change – in the form of a “Letter from 2070”. Those present were struck by its chilling message. I invite you to view it on the IH&RA website (link…) where it can also be downloaded – and forwarded to those around you who may be interested.

Change – so they say - is the only constant in life. We as hospitality professionals are continually adapting to change – social, economic, technological. Many of these changes are welcome. But from all we read today, Climate Change is not. Its forecast consequences for the global environment are devastating: decrease in winter snowfalls, increased frequency of heat waves and drought, more destructive storms, increased cyclone intensity and diminishing water resources. This is one change we must fight against with every means at our disposal.

From encouraging guests to re-use their towels to environmentally-friendly hotel buildings to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, no measure is too small or too great to be considered. To quote from our colleague Hervé Houdré’s excellent report on Sustainable Hospitality: “A thousand miles journey starts with the first step”.