Svart was named Winner of Best Sustainable Hotel - Rest of World at the 2025 Travelling for Business Awards, the boldest sustainability statement in world hospitality taking the category's top honour.
Rising from the waters of the Holandsfjorden at the foot of the Svartisen glacier, just above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, Svart is conceived as something no hotel has been before: an energy-positive property, designed to produce more energy over its lifetime than it consumes - construction included. Its ring-shaped form, developed with the acclaimed architects
Snøhetta, is engineered around the Arctic sun, harvesting solar energy while minimising heating demand, and the elevated structure touches its pristine surroundings as lightly as a building of such ambition can. Reached by boat across the fjord, it will be off-grid in spirit and in fact.
The project's influence already outstrips its footprint. By setting a benchmark beyond net zero - and publishing the thinking behind it - Svart has shifted the global conversation about what new-build hospitality should aspire to, the way concept cars shape the vehicles everyone eventually drives. For the sustainability leads and travel managers among the Travelling for Business readership, it offers a preview of standards tomorrow's travel programmes may take for granted. Norway itself is moving the same direction, introducing a
visitor tax to fund sustainable tourism nationwide - context that makes Svart look less like an outlier than a national statement of intent - from a country whose
design-led hospitality this magazine has long admired.
Voters crowned that boldness. In a field where fine hotels compete on incremental gains, Svart represents the frontier itself, and its promise - an Arctic experience of glacier, fjord and midnight sun delivered with a conscience as clear as the water below - captured the category's imagination outright, ahead of Finalists The Hideout in Thailand and Adrère Amellal in Egypt.
The engineering honours its setting at every step. Svart is designed to the exacting Powerhouse standard - the Scandinavian benchmark for energy-positive building - with the structure raised on slender piles that minimise contact with the fjord bed, construction methods chosen for reversibility, and materials selected to weather the Arctic on the sun's income alone. Even reaching the hotel is part of the philosophy: guests will arrive by boat, roads deliberately left unbuilt.
As the
Travelling for Business Awards look towards 2026, Svart stands as the project the whole industry watches: the hotel designed not just to spare the planet, but to give something back.
