The BTN Group in early May announced the recipients of its inaugural BTN Group Sustainability Awards. HRS CEO Tobias Ragge was voted by a panel of managed travel industry professionals and sustainability experts outside the travel industry as the 2023 Business Travel Sustainability Champion for his and HRS’ work in putting forth the Green Stay Initiative, which creates standardized data points for the hotel community to convey their environmental conservation journey to business travel buyers and procurement professionals. The program gained traction in a cash-starved, labor-starved hotel industry in the depths of a pandemic and has gained momentum more recently across seven major hotel brands as well as independent hotels by offering hotels a clear “ramp up” journey to sustainability data transparency—all while keeping the program free of charge and the data open for hotels to use outside the GSI environment for other sustainability-oriented projects. Ragge sat down with BTN editorial director Elizabeth West to talk about the win and HRS’ continued strategic plans around the Green Stay Initiative.

BTN: First, congratulations are in order for being named BTN Group 2023 Sustainability Champion. What does that mean for you, and why is an award like this important to our industry?

Tobias Ragge: First and foremost, it shows the hard work that our team is putting into this is seen as valuable and addressing a very pressing topic in travel. It shows me we’re doing the right things. The recognition itself is very important for the team because at the end of the day, let’s face it, I’m the face to the outer world. Credit for the program needs to go to people like Martin Biermann, especially, who worked on so much of the intellectual property around the Green Stay Initiative and many others on the HRS team. You know, in terms of the work itself, I honestly never think of sustainability as having an endpoint, but just as a continuous journey. It’s great HRS got this recognition from the BTN Group and it’s a testimony to the importance of the work, but the work isn’t over.

The Green Stay Initiative is the bedrock upon which you were recognized. What has been HRS’ goal for the hotel community and for travel buyers in introducing that program?

Ragge: Prior to the pandemic, we saw momentum [toward] sustainable travel. So our supply partnership teams did the hard work to take hoteliers who might not always think about the importance of being on this journey, and convince them to give us at least 25 sets of data. Sometimes they don’t even know where to get it. Through [those data sets], you’re creating transparency, which is always the first thing when you don’t know what the result will be. On the other hand, it’s scary for a lot of people because they are not seeing this as an opportunity, but much more as a risk. What if the data is showing their performance is not good?

Since then has been the publication of the latest on Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in the EU, so there’s a lot of regulatory pressure for corporates to mitigate their carbon emissions, create transparency [in supply chains] and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by a certain period. 2040 is the climate pledge, but a lot of companies are now saying [they are tracking toward] 2030.

In that environment, [hotels] have to deliver sustainability data to their corporate customers. If you are not providing transparency—whether that’s through Green Stay or other initiatives—I think you will very soon no longer be part of large managed corporate programs.

So there must be demand from the buyers’ side for this. Is it just the organizational buyer, or is there also pressure from employees who want to book sustainable options?

Ragge: It is right now the early stage of providing this, but I would say for the economic buyer it’s a minimum criteria to take regulatory risk off the table for the corporation. For the employee, it’s providing the capability to do the right thing [when booking their business travel] toward maintaining a greener planet.

Siemens leverages Green Stay as an integral piece of its lodging program. They’ve also been collaborative and leaned in with you. How important is it to have a collaboration partner like that?

Ragge: Those partnerships have been instrumental … to create the success that this initiative has had. Because, quite frankly, when you go out and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this, this is great. But you have to provide the data,’ everybody is like, ‘Why? We don’t know where to get that data, it’s a big effort,’ etc. 

That's a normal reaction in the beginning, [but] to have strong partners say, "Listen, this is the direction we want to go and this is the direction as a procurement organization we are expecting from our partners." Coming from a procurement as powerful and professional as Siemens was very important to also make suppliers understand why they needed to consider this.

Are you able to show hotels that participate in Green Stay actually convert more business, or only that they have success in the RFP Process, but not necessarily in the final booking with individuals?

Ragge: Because corporates like Siemens are making [supply chain sustainability reporting] more mandatory, the success ratio of hotels providing the Green Stay data is more than one-third higher in the conversation than the non-Green Stay associated ones. With companies making it more mandatory for their programs, the bookings will also come.

What’s possibly more interesting, and we’ve talked about this before, is the convergence element [for travel and meetings], and we are seeing that more in corporate buying decisions which are getting bigger and bigger [in terms of volume].

Why is it important to focus on hotels when air emissions make up so much of the travel emissions picture?

Ragge: There’s huge fragmentation of the [hotel] market to the corporation’s business travelers. Taking all that data and the granularity on the one side but making it simple for the consumer to understand the points of difference on the other is challenging. But when you look at it, lodging is the area in travel where individuals have the most choices. When I go from A to B on a plane, I usually have two or three routes operating and they operate more or less the same aircraft type. So I have really little choice. In lodging I have hundreds of choices, which are sometimes spread twentyfold in terms of emissions. But I think we have to make that data picture more tangible to travelers—for example, ‘This trade-off is equivalent emissions to heating four houses for an entire day.’

As BTN Group’s sustainability champion, how do you see the role of corporations and corporate travel in terms of greening the entire travel industry?

Ragge: Travel industry change will have to come from pressure from the corporate community because, let’s face it, we’re also in a in a world where recession is coming, maybe—inflation is high, people have less buying power, there’s lot of uncertainty about capital markets, all of that. I see consumers are already starting to cut down on their expenditures and, let’s be honest, a lot of people will say, ‘Yes, we should save the planet, but I’m not starting this today, even if it’s a tiny amount.’ But it’s going to get more expensive, so imagine how sensitive individuals will be. Regardless, corporations will need to account for that as part of business travel and new business practices going forward.

Green Stay is free right now for buyers and suppliers. Will it always be that way?

Ragge: We’re not going to charge for any of these services. This is not changing in the future to say, ‘Oh, now we have the data, you need to renew the data and pay us a fee or something.’ At the end, that’s also our commitment to creating that greener planet, even if that sounds like such a big audacious goal.

Travel is really visible, and I think our industry has to consider how we avoid the stigma that the tobacco industry has had with their product, given that about 10 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions are produced by travel. As an industry we need to proactively address this and not wait for someone else to try to do it for us.