As the number of corporations pledging to become carbon-neutral rises, they’re looking at partners in their supply chains to move in that direction as well. This trend has started to affect the choices corporations make for their lodging programs. Several hotel companies have said that the number of requests from buyers about sustainability practices has skyrocketed in the past year or so.
One problem: There is no single industry standard for how to measure a hotel’s sustainability footprint.
Enter corporate lodging platform HRS. In March, the company launched its Green Stay Initiative, which uses a proprietary formula to give participating hotels in its inventory a sustainability score that takes into account a property’s energy consumption, water use and waste disposal. Buyers can use the scores to determine which hotels to include in their programs, and they can highlight those properties that meet a defined sustainability threshold in their online booking tools.
HRS CEO Tobias Ragge saw the growing need for sustainability data and believes it will be even more important in the future.
“Everybody understands the importance of it,” Ragge said. “It started with consumer sentiment, then the regulators and especially the financial communities have stepped in and said they have expectations [around sustainability] for organizations to do business. That really changed the dynamics of the discussions.”
As of late November, buyers from 70 countries were part of HRS’ corporate lodging forums and sustainability labs, and hotels from 72 countries were participating and being scored. Accor was the first major hotel company to sign onto the initiative, in October, followed by Marriott International, in November. In early December, HRS announced Taj Hotels, NH Hotel Group and Leonardo Hotels also joined the initiative.
Marriott chose to join Green Stay “because the HRS effort is rooted in metrics,” said hotel company’s VP of sustainability and supplier diversity Denise Naguib. “It is leveraging the methodologies that we have worked together on as an industry for almost a decade now. Transforming that into a way business travelers can access data and make decisions on was an important element for us as we continue to be more transparent with our sustainability information.”