Mountains have a way of exposing pretence, which makes
Hotel Valsana's achievement the more convincing. Crowned Winner of Best Sustainable Hotel of the Year (Europe) at the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, the Arosa property demonstrated that environmental rigour, done properly, is indistinguishable from luxury.
Valsana stands at 1,800 metres beside the Obersee lake, at the forest's edge where the Swiss village of Arosa begins and the ski slopes end, literally: guests can ski to the door. Part of the family-owned Tschuggen Collection and a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, the hotel was built to exacting environmental and energy standards, its wood-and-stone architecture and independently certified operations designed so that sustainability functions as infrastructure rather than decoration. Even the arrival is low-carbon by design, at the end of one of Switzerland's classic alpine rail journeys, with the free local Arosa Card making cars redundant thereafter.
Life inside repays the principles. Forty rooms and nine apartments frame the mountains through panoramic windows; a spa spread across two floors, supported by the hotel's green energy systems, looks out over forest and peaks; and the easy-going TWIST restaurant champions regional Grisons ingredients alongside inventive plant-based cooking. Summer brings hiking, biking and lake swimming; winter, some of the Alps' most charming skiing, making Valsana a genuinely year-round proposition for the growing corporate market seeking retreats that honour company sustainability pledges without feeling like penance.
The 2024 judges chose Valsana from a European shortlist of exceptional depth, Borgo Pignano, Cas Gasi, Svart and The Pig at Combe, and the verdict carried a message for the industry: the bar is no longer green intentions but green engineering, delivered with warmth.
The Tschuggen Collection setting adds institutional depth. Valsana operates alongside its sister hotels under a family ownership that has invested in Arosa's hospitality for generations, with group-wide environmental commitments, from renewable energy to arrival-by-rail incentives, giving the hotel's practices structural backing rather than marketing garnish. Guests can even combine properties across the group's Swiss portfolio, sustainability and indulgence travelling together by train.
The
Travelling for Business Awards champion the hotels building hospitality's future, and Hotel Valsana's 2024 title placed that future, appropriately enough, high in the Swiss Alps with the cleanest of consciences.
