ILUNION Hotels brings its sustainable model to the Hosteltur Meeting
ILUNION Hotels brings its sustainable model to the Hosteltur Meeting
30 October, 2026
José Ángel Preciados and Beatriz Miguel argued at the 5th Hosteltur Sustainable Tourism Meeting that being sustainable also makes a company more profitable.
Sustainability is now part of the business model of tourism companies. That was the idea repeated on 28 October at the 5th Hosteltur Sustainable Tourism Meeting, which brought together some twenty industry experts at the ILUNION Pío XII hotel in Madrid.
ILUNION Hotels took part as host and with two voices of its own. Beatriz Miguel, the company’s general manager, opened the event. José Ángel Preciados, chief executive officer, took part in an interview with Manuel Molina, editor of Hosteltur.
Beatriz Miguel opens the event
Beatriz Miguel presented the meeting and summed up the spirit of the day in one sentence: “Sustainability is no longer a matter of commitment, but of profitability and the future.”
Claudia Magriñá and Ricardo Camilleri, from Deloitte Spain, then put figures on the challenge. According to the data they presented, the 100 million tourists Spain receives each year generate around 44 million tonnes of CO2 emissions and consume more than 200,000 million litres of water, the equivalent of more than 85,000 Olympic swimming pools.
José Ángel Preciados: profitability as a consequence
In his interview, José Ángel Preciados explained that, for ILUNION Hotels, sustainability “goes far beyond the purely environmental; it is part of the whole management of a company.” The chain’s commitment reaches governance, risk management, environmental commitment, hotel assets and inclusion, among other areas. Preciados described all of this as “indicators that tell you that you are doing things right, and that has an effect on immediate profitability.”
The CEO made the priority clear: “Economic profitability is a consequence of what we do, but it is not an obsession.” He noted that the company has 33 hotels and an EBITDA margin of 26%. According to Hosteltur, Preciados acknowledged that they could earn more, but said that what matters to them is building the model, because all of their profit is connected to that approach.
People and planet at the centre
Preciados also turned the conversation to the moment the industry is going through. “The hotel industry is making a great deal of money,” he said, and argued that part of that profit should go to problems that remain unsolved, such as the lack of talent, absenteeism and the loss of competitiveness.
Along these lines, he argued that “personnel costs are not a cost as such, but an investment in order to remain competitive.” He focused on pay, on the wellbeing of teams (ILUNION Hotels has a psychologist in every hotel) and on the lack of housing for people who work in holiday destinations.
A model built every day
The talks by Beatriz Miguel and José Ángel Preciados sum up ILUNION Hotels’ way of understanding the hotel business: people at the centre, respect for the environment and a profitability that comes as the result of doing things well. If you want to experience it first-hand, discover our hotels.
