Staying power

Hotel and other accommodation usually accounts for no more than five per cent of a company’s total business travel carbon emissions, according to various estimates. In that case, is it worth collecting sustainability data for hotels?

The emphatic answer, say sustainability and corporate travel experts, is yes. For one thing, increasing regulatory requirements oblige companies to report on their entire carbon footprint. But, perhaps more importantly, good data can help to reduce your travel programme’s environmental harm.

While identifying and booking more sustainable hotels is no substitute for the most effective travel decarbonisation remedy of flying less, those greener accommodation choices are proving increasingly meaningful. Hotels can account for a substantial proportion of emissions for companies which fly little – or less than they used to. And choosing a less carbon-hungry hotel genuinely makes a difference. “In Germany, best in class is 2-5kg CO2 equivalent per hotel night, but it can easily go up to 50kg,” says Eric Hofmeister, global commodity manager for lodging at Siemens.

Understanding and then communicating those degrees of variation, either directly or through labelling, is invaluable for showing employees how their decisions can make a difference. “Being able to articulate that really helps embed that sustainability mindset and culture within your organisation,” says Ami Taylor, CEO of Goodwork Sustainability UK, a sustainability consultancy for small and medium enterprises. 

ROOM FOR DIFFERENTIATION

For many travel managers the challenge is where to source the data, especially as carbon is only one aspect to be considered. Other environmental factors include water consumption and waste. Put another way, can travel managers find the information which will help them and their travellers identify which hotels to favour?

According to Taylor, the answering, increasingly, is yes. “You really can start to distinguish hotels now,” she says, “but with two caveats. First of all, tread carefully: do your due diligence; and then secondly, make sure that you've got the right service providers who have done their own due diligence and are offering robust ways for you to make those comparisons and feed the information to your travel management company and booking tool.”

Inge Huijbrechts, chief sustainability and security officer for Radisson Hotel Group, says: “Whenever we meet with our top corporate clients, [whether there is reliable environmental data] is the question that keeps coming back.”

For a company like Radisson, which positions itself for competitive advantage as an environmental leader, including recently opening what it has labelled “verified net zero” properties in Manchester and in Oslo with fully renewable energy, it could hardly be a more critical question. Her answer too is 'yes', there is data available to help inform buying decisions – and in fact “there has been for more than ten years”.

Huijbrechts is referring to the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative (there is a similar initiative for reporting water consumption), launched in 2012 by the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, which represents most of the major global chains. HCMI is used by 30,000 hotels worldwide. Generally, hotels which provide HCMI data also participate in the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmark Index, the industry’s largest annual benchmarker of energy, water and carbon.

HCMI and Cornell are the starting point for most of the corporate travel processes that feed environmental hotel data either to travel managers for their procurement work or into point of sale information for bookers of travel. Among the former is the Global Business Travel Association’s hotel request for proposal tools, which receive a hearty endorsement from Huijbrechts.

DATA QUALITY

For Taylor, the key improvement in recent years has been better scrutiny of the data that hotels submit to HCMI and elsewhere. “Are hotels essentially able to mark their own homework and say whatever they like?” Taylor asks. “Or is there some form of validation? That's where we've seen an increase in robustness and more hotels being asked to demonstrate their claims.”

Where there is still work to do in some cases is at the end of the chain: giving the right information to the bookers whose point-of-sale decisions will actually lead to greener choices. Some TMCs and booking tools, says Huijbrechts, are “very, very good at highlighting sustainable hotels. In others, it’s not yet fully defined how sustainable hotels are highlighted. And that’s a pity.” Again, it’s for buyers to do the work on whether their chosen TMC and booking tool pass this test.

In terms of how sustainability information should be presented to bookers, Angela Lille, chair of the sustainability working group of travel buyer advocacy body BT4Europe, aligns with Siemens’ view (see below) that labelling is better than figures.

One example among several is the Green Flag from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, which American Express Global Business Travel among others deploys in its booking tools. “It has 16 very rigorous criteria assessing whether a hotel is sustainable. Part of the assurance includes on-site audits,” says Amex GBT head of sustainability Nora Lovell Marchant.

But Lille is keen to stress another form of due diligence for buyers: engaging directly with hotels, which has a purpose beyond obtaining the specific information required. “Go beyond the certifications and labels to really ask hotels what they are doing in terms of energy, to avoid waste and so on,” she says. “The more you ask, the more the demand for action on sustainability is clear to the hospitality sector.”