Our Story

Tim Wheeldon and Tony Clark founded Zeal Hotels back in 2012 to create a group of sustainable hotels to ensure that staying in a hotel, whether for business or pleasure, would not harm the planet.

The hotel and wider travel sector have been lagging in the race - and requirement - to be carbon neutral by 2050. The hospitality industry has to reduce its carbon by 66% on 2019 levels, and the rate of development means that 80% of the hotel stock we will have in 2050 has already been built. Therefore, the biggest challenge and initial cost we face is converting existing hotels into sustainable assets & operations.

The hospitality market in the UK is growing, we are living longer & we still like to travel, meet family, friends & explore. We must get our existing hotels in order; however, with demand increasing, there continues to be a market for new-build hotels in specific geographical locations.

We wondered what the hotel sector was doing about sustainability and realised that something needed to change. We started thinking about how that might work and began work on plans to create an industry-leading sustainable hotel brand without compromising on the guest experience and comfort levels.

We think that hotels should seek to reduce emissions rather than offset them. The challenge includes the construction and operation of the hotels, as we will be accountable for our emissions (Scope 1 & 2) and the construction and operation of supply chains’ emissions (Scope 3). The deconstruction and reuse of materials after the entire life cycle of the hotel is also something we must address in terms of carbon emissions and financial costs.

The company’s first sustainable hotel with 142-rooms, restaurant, bar, meeting rooms & gardens is presently a site at Exeter Science Park & detailed planning permission was granted in December 2022.

Please follow our progress on LinkedIn.

We appointed our architect, engineer & design consultants in Dec 2019, and since then, the team has expanded considerably. At the moment, Zeal Hotels is focusing on Exeter; however other opportunities are being considered.