Interview Summary
Jim Damalas, founder and CEO of Greentique Hotels, discusses the origins and growth of the ecotourism industry in Costa Rica and his own involvement in the field, which followed a career in television and advertising. A UCLA political science graduate and Sierra Club member who first saw Costa Rica in the early 1970s, Damalas opened a boutique sustainable hotel and restaurant, which became the basis for the first luxury-oriented eco-hotel in 1993. The interview describes Damalas's interests in environmentalism and landscape architecture and provides deep insights into both the goals of ecotourism as well as tensions between public and private environmental efforts. Damalas further narrates the key role of technology, which facilitated reservations and advertising but also enabled price bidding in the industry.
[H]aving a history on the property that goes back to the mid-’70s, we saw how nature had taken back what farmers had unfortunately destroyed when they deforested most of Costa Rica…[we] know our customers are here for nature, more than anything else. So it pays to save the landscape.
Additional Resources
Brian Kay, “Hotel Company Leads Pack in Going Green,”
Tico Times, May 9, 2008
Environmental Movement and Ecotourism in Costa Rica, 1992, Series II, Oral History Sound Recordings, 1968-1992, Royal G. Jackson Papers, circa 1905-1992, Oregon State University Special Collections
Sterling Evans, The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999
Greentique Hotels [company website]
Geoffrey Jones and Andrew Spadafora, "Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica," Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-136.
“Costa Rica Ecotourism” [video]
Interview Citation Format
"Interview with Jim Damalas, interviewed by Andrew Spadafora, June 4, 2014, Creating Emerging Markets Project, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, http://www.hbs.edu/creating-emerging-markets/."
