Banyan Group’s Ho Kwon Ping talks about his social sustainability grand plan in Phuket

Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Ho’s corporate umbrella, the Banyan Tree Group, rebranded as the Banyan Group, officially cementing the company’s expansion beyond the traditional luxury market with its increasingly diverse offerings. The announcement was followed by an international press junket at Laguna Phuket to unveil a US$2 billion project touted to be Thailand’s largest eco-friendly private residential development. 

The mystery project is Laguna Lakelands, a “one-million-square-metre” residential development designed to attract a global community by promising a balanced lifestyle with nature-oriented recreational facilities, a town centre, as well as infrastructures that support hybrid and remote working. Sweetening the deal is the access to the adjacent Laguna Phuket’s facilities.

Banyan Group’s expansion into residential development is in synergy with the Thai government’s push to develop Phuket from a purely tourism destination into a more diversified economy by building better infrastructure, and the unprecedented rate of global migration. Ho himself bought three single-storey bungalows in Phuket for him and his two children during the pandemic and now calls Phuket home as much as Singapore.

Laguna Lakelands’ concept of a hospitality-led integrated residential enclave might not be new, but what makes it novel is Ho’s vision to promote what he calls “social sustainability” by weaving the project into the fabric of the greater local community in Phuket. Most of Laguna Lakelands’ ground and shared facilities will be made available to the public, and Ho hopes the development can contribute to providing the locals with public places they currently lack, like a botanical garden, for instance.

Ho calls it an experiment. “We are building a community of a scale which we’ve never done before at Laguna Lakelands, and we hope to make it more than just a big gated community,” he shares. “In many developing countries, people build gated communities that say you’re rich when you are inside and you’re poor when you are outside—there’s absolutely no attempt to integrate. And in fact, that’s the selling point. I’m now trying to do something that would be societally somewhat different. Can I create a large community of relatively well-off residents from the entry to luxury level, who are quite happy not to be inside a small gated community but can feel safe interacting with a larger public? That would be the big experiment.” 

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When we ask how he will measure the success of this social sustainability experiment in the future, Ho posits, “Maybe the metrics haven’t existed yet. Maybe we have to create our own.” It would not be the first time that one of his projects set a new standard either. “Banyan Tree Maldives was the very first hotel to have a marine diversity and conservation centre. And now every hotel has one. We developed our own metrics, guidelines—what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do them,” he elaborates.

The Banyan Group has been able to do this by tapping into its internal talents, as well as collaborating with external partners and consultants. “But I’ve always said, if you don’t know what you want, a consultant is not going to help you get there. If you know what you want, the consultant will help you get there. You need to know what you want, and where the ‘there’ that you want to go is.”

Measuring how responsible a development is, Ho says, can be broken down into many aspects. “One would be responsibility regarding physical sustainability— are you trying to minimise water usage? Are you using reflective glass?” he says. The quantitative part is the easy part, according to Ho.

Another relatively easy part is the landscaping, for which the Banyan Group is collaborating with SUGi, a platform dedicated to the creation of pocket forests in urban areas. The organisation uses the Miyawaki method, a concept pioneered by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, to create pocket forests with three layers of native plants—ground cover, shrubs, and tall trees—to “rewild” and restore damaged ecosystems.

“We are rewilding a big patch of the forest and some of our urban areas here, rather than just creating a pretty landscape. People are moving away from manicured gardens with foreign plants to bring back native forests,” shares Ho. 

So what’s the hard part?

“The most difficult area we’ll be trying to develop metrics so that we can call ourselves responsible developers are those related to the human context,” Ho says.

The Banyan Group has maintained a community kindergarten for staff for over 30 years, and it has a number of things in the works to further community integration at Laguna Lakelands. “The public parks, country club, beach club—as we go along, we have to define the metrics for ourselves, to not preach ‘this is what everybody must do’ and just go along our little happy path doing what we think is right by us.”

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“Retirement? What’s that? Never heard of it,” Ho quips when asked if he has a plan for it. These days he has four places that “he can go to without having to bring luggage”: Singapore, Phuket, Bangkok, and Tokyo, but the first two are the places he considers his home, where he spends time with his nearest and dearest.

Ho has largely left the running and managing of his separately listed family enterprise, Thai Wah Public Company (TWPC), to his son Ho Ren Hua, and the Banyan Group to his daughter Ho Ren Yung.

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“So the [succession] process is starting with my letting go, not necessarily the highest profit generator, but the most complex operations. I’m really clearly letting them run on their own now, so that when I’m no longer around, the most complex part of the business will be functioning smoothly,” he shares.

That being said, he is still “having fun” with the two pillars of his business, the property development and the directly owned hotels, always exploring what is next in responsible development. And we look forward to seeing how the saga continues.

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