Startup came out of pandemic – “to scale, we have to digitise sustainability”

A lot of startup founders, probably, at some point in their journey, will say, “If only I had known then what I know now”.

For Cape Town-based Julie Cheetham and her co-founder of Weeva, Lindsey Walter, both of whom came from hospitality with no background in tech, that moment of truth came when the sustainability tech platform they had outsourced to build turned out not to be what they had envisaged.

“We were inspired by Fitbit and Apple Fitness, and we wanted to build a “sustainability consultant in your pocket” product that would allow hotels to track their sustainability in the same way we track our fitness these days. But we had to scrap the entire build at the end of 2021 – it was not what our vision was – and we had to rebuild from scratch during 2022 and write if off to experience.”

In June this year, Weeva  hired a CTO James Lever whose background includes being CTO of ZEN3 UK Limited and, before that, CWT Digital.

“If we had known then what we know now, we would have hired a fulltime CTO earlier,” laughed Cheetham.

But perhaps the delay was a blessing in disguise because Weeva, a digital system for managing sustainability in hospitality, launched as the travel industry was in recovery mode and into a market that is crying out for simple, affordable sustainability solutions, especially for small, independent hotels.

“The reception has been amazing, with many people eager to try Weeva,” said Cheetham. “Even though we built it for hoteliers, we have lots of engagement from tour operators and destinations – national tourism boards and DMOs who want reports related to carbon footprint, water management and human rights metrics.

“We have tour operators and OTAs wanting information for disclosure, to enable their customers to book the right kind of hotels.”

Weeva is a (SaaS) platform that enables users to adopt a measurable and holistic sustainability practice. It offers a 360-degree interconnected system of tools and easy-to-use technology that tracks and reports on net environmental and social impact in real-time. As a result of entering all the necessary data, properties will get a live progress indicator score and can chart where they want to grow.

Dashboard being adapted for use beyond hospitality

It received seed funding from Oppenheimer Generations,  and its founding partners are The Long Run and Preferred by Nature.

To date, there are over 130 hotels actively using Weeva and the company is targeting 750 hotels by year end. Africa is the largest market for now, followed by Europe and South-east Asia.

Given the interest from the travel trade, it is adapting the Weeva dashboard for destinations and tour operators to show impact infographics and headline metrics “which are easy to understand”, said Cheetham. An itinerary impact calculator covering flights, transfers and hotels is planned for launch during the first half of next year.

Julie Cheetham: “We wanted to build a “sustainability in your pocket” product that would allow hotels to track their sustainability in the same way we track our fitness these days.”

To grow faster, it is pursuing partnerships such as the one it’s struck with Small Luxury Hotels of The World which has 500 members, many of which the Weeva team is busy onboarding. .

Weeva  has also recently joined the Sustainability Hospitality Alliance in the UK as an affiliate member. SHA has 50,000 properties in its global network.

Weeva charges an annual license fee ranging from $750 to $1,200 for hotels, depending on size, and is working on a partnership fee for destinations and tour operators.

“Tourism as usual had to change – we had to digitise”

Before starting Weeva, Cheetham worked as an independent sustainability consultant and a lot of clients were hotels, a number of which happened to be members of The Long Run, the membership community of nature-based tourism businesses committed to driving holistic sustainability.

“During the pandemic, with the African safari industry crumbling, we held a thinktank and asked the question, how do we improve our resilience in the face of these challenges? It was clear that tourism as usual had to change.

“We discussed ideas on how to bring sustainability more broadly to others, and we knew we had to digitise. Relying on certification and consulting is not scalable. We had to digitise sustainability knowledge and advice, and provide analytics, monitoring and reporting.

“For independent hotels, in particular, income streams were affected and a lot more had to be done to improve their resilience. Colonial legacy, climate change, lack of indigenous ownership, biodiversity – all these issues have to be tackled.

“Eighty percent of the industry is owned by independents; we thought about how to make them more resilient in terms of financial, environmental and people.”

“One day, hoteliers will look at carbon footprint per guest the same way they look at occupancy”

Weeva’s platform is based on The Long Run’s four Cs – Conservation, Community, Culture and Commerce. “Based on the four Cs, we took a balanced scoreboard approach and further defined the measurables into 18 areas.”

Although the product-market-fit is “pretty good”, she said, what it’s found is that “in general, people need more help.”

“We built it as a SaaS product to keep costs down but independent hotels don’t have the resources in their own team, and they need training and hand holding. We have established Weeva Connect to help people navigate the system and we have also simplified a few parts of the system.”

Cheetham hopes that one day, hotel general managers will look at carbon footprint per guest the way they look at occupancy and RevPAR. “The EU is taking the lead in reporting standards and other regions will follow shortly and soon hoteliers will look at carbon and water the same way they look at NPS and occupancies.”

It now employs 30 full-time staff, with bases in London and Johannesburg. It is looking to hire more sales and support team in Europe, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

So one year on, what has it learnt about how hospitality is scoring on sustainability? Said Cheetham, “Many hotels are  doing extremely well on some things such as community impact and social impact as well as water conservation and even biodiversity projects by city hotels but, generally, the industry is doing poorly in carbon footprint management.

“In the monitoring of energy consumption, hotels may realise when they see their data trends, that they have not been able to reduce their energy consumption as significantly as they had thought.  Hopefully now that general managers can see trend data, we will see a change.”

As for her own lesson learnt from starting Weeva, Cheetham said, “It’s how difficult it is to run a tech company if you are not from tech. We had to learn to manage expectations – how long it takes to design and develop something, not weeks, but months to develop a new feature.

And despite the hiccup with the original tech platform, Cheetham said, “We wouldn’t have done it any differently except, as I said, hired a full time CTO much earlier on.”

Note: Julie Cheetham will be speaking at WiT Singapore, Oct 2-4, at Marina Bay Sands. Check out programme here.