Guardian of Sanctuary Resorts

Pacific Asia Travel Association’s trade show floors are never short of outsized personalities. At the PATA’s PTM2025, hosted in Bangkok, one figure drew attention not by flamboyance but by quiet authority. Andrew Jones, who styles himself not as CEO or Chairman but as “Guardian” of Sanctuary Resorts, sat down with David Barrett, Host of Trends at the pop-up studio on the show floor, for what became less an interview and more a meditation on what tourism can and should be. Jones, a man who grew up in the trade as his parents managed inns and restaurants in the United Kingdom, has spent more than four decades in the upper echelons of hospitality, holding senior posts from London to Bermuda, Canada, Hong Kong and across Asia. But it was in 1996 that he cut away from the corporate ladder to found Sanctuary Resorts, a management company with a singular mission: to balance body, mind and spirit in a business model that also lifts communities and leaves the environment better than it found it.

“When I started the company,” Jones recalled with characteristic understatement, “somebody asked me what title I wanted. Chairman? Chief Executive? I said no, I just want to guard the integrity of the concept. A friend replied: ‘Then you’re the Guardian of the Sanctuary.’ It was a gift.” That gift became both a personal creed and a marketing device. For nearly three decades, Sanctuary Resorts has run or supported award-winning properties in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. Each has been shaped by a philosophy that Jones describes as “community-based tourism”,  hotels that are profitable businesses but also catalysts for local development. “We create a resort, then work with the local community to help address their needs,” he said. It was an idea so far ahead of its time that, as Jones noted, his friends thought he had either joined a cult or needed another drink.

The conversation turned inevitably to the semantics of sustainability, that most overused of buzzwords in today’s travel industry. For Jones it is not jargon but lived practice. He has long argued that the surest route to environmental stewardship is through people. “If I work with the local community, they will look after the nature and the habitat. If I just look after the habitat, the people may not participate. So social sustainability, which embraces training, educating, giving people meaning and purpose, is the key.” It is a perspective that has informed his wider industry service as a Trustee of the PATA Foundation, advisor on CSR, and board member of global responsible tourism initiatives.

Sanctuary’s model has never been to build empires. Resorts are handed back to owners or communities after a period of years, the template refreshed and reapplied elsewhere. “It keeps me alive and active,” Jones said, with the glint of someone who has no intention of slowing down. His emphasis on experiences over commodities also anticipated shifts that the mainstream has only lately embraced. “When we opened in Bali nearly 30 years ago, I told the team: we’re not selling rooms and food and beverage. We’re selling experiences. That’s what people wanted then, and it’s what Generation Z wants today.”

Wellness, once a fringe concept, has become mainstream since the pandemic. Jones sees COVID-19 as an accelerator of something he had always believed: “Life can be short. People want to be healthy, active, preventative. That’s our guest. Somebody who values community, sustainability and their own well-being.” Yet he resists the drift towards medicalisation, insisting Sanctuary is about prevention and balance rather than treatment.

Technology, too, finds its place in his worldview. He admits with a chuckle that he uses artificial intelligence to draft reports and speeches, but always with the maxim “high tech in the back, high touch in the front.” The guest experience remains rooted in human contact, with technology enabling rather than replacing. Staff, mostly recruited from surrounding villages, are mentored by a handful of expatriates, the aim being to build local capacity until the community itself can lead.

Barrett, Trends host, asked him a question posed by one of  the viewers: how does one reconcile luxury with responsibility? His answer was revealing. Luxury, he argued, is not about excess but about contentment. “At our resort in Bali we had 20 pool villas, each with its own pool. Conde Nast ranked it among the world’s best. Guests saw it as luxury. But for me it was about simplicity delivered with style, local staff trained and empowered, cuisine rooted in the village. Is that indulgence? Or is it having everything you need? Perhaps that’s true luxury.”

This philosophy has not been without its trials. At Khao Lak, Thailand, Sanctuary’s resort was destroyed in the 2004 tsunami, with staff and guests lost. Jones speaks of it quietly, the trauma still present two decades later, but the experience reinforced his conviction that tourism is inseparable from community resilience. To this day, Sanctuary supports the villages where it once operated.

In an era when “sustainability” risks being reduced to a box-ticking exercise, Jones offers something rarer: a model that is profitable, replicable, and human at its core. His title, Guardian, may once have been a quirk, but after an hour in conversation it feels entirely apt. He is guarding not just a brand but an idea: that hospitality at its best is not about extraction but exchange, not about empire but empathy.

As our microphones were switched off and the bustle of the trade floor resumed, Jones left with the same unhurried calm with which he had arrived. “The people my parents worked with became their family,” he told Barrett. “Their guests became their friends. That’s the spirit of hospitality I carry with me. If we can spread that, we’re doing our job.”

In a business driven by margins, growth and scale, Andrew Jones stands as an anomaly. And perhaps a prophet. For if the future of travel is to be sustainable and meaningful in any real sense, it may well be guarded by men and women like him.

Thanks to PATA for facilitating this interview at PTM2025