Hotel companies, individual hotels and businesses outside of the hospitality industry have raised their environmental and sustainability priorities, but now some of that responsibility is being pushed to individual employees.

Paul Proctor, vice president, commercial, Europe for IHG Hotels & Resorts, said individuals are growing more thoughtful on sustainability as governments and countries prioritize initiatives to reduce emissions or commit more resources to renewable energy. This, in turn, has caused a change in the way procurers and companies think about travel and hotel selection.

Proctor said companies taking a lead in this have adopted programs that go much further in terms of personal responsibility for carbon footprints.

“One corporate procurer I spoke to recently has instigated in their company a more stringent approach — hotels, flights and car [rental] are displayed by their carbon use," Proctor said. "The traveler is then given a carbon budget for the year, and once it is consumed, then no more travel is allowed.

“In a post-pandemic environment where we are already more thoughtful about the purpose and return on investment of travel, this adds another layer in to the decision-making process for the traveler,” he said.

Proctor said by scrutinizing carbon footprints in travel budgets, one of the first questions that companies and their employees will ask is: Is this trip truly worth it?

Paloma Zapata, CEO of Barcelona-based Sustainable Travel International, said she views such policies as a "climate-smart forward-thinking approach."

"Under a climate emergency and post-pandemic world, businesses that take on this approach are creating awareness and actively incentivizing employees to make smarter decisions and take ownership of their footprint. It's brilliant," she said.

Inge Huijbrechts, global senior vice president of sustainability, security and corporate communications at Radisson Hotel Group, said it's common for clients’ sustainability strategies to measure travel and overnight carbon footprints based on numbers provided by travel and rooms providers.

Clients push "heavily to get information on the carbon footprint per hotel room night spent, or per hotel, visible on the [global distribution system]. They are looking at what the hotel business partner is trying to achieve in terms of net zero and are also setting goals on how to reduce their scope of carbon footprint in relation to business travel," she said. "We have frequent conversations on how we can align initiatives in order to support this."

Corporate clients are constantly adapting travel policies on sustainability, Huijbrechts said. They often ask to have more data on adoption ratios and impact so they can show the level of partnership with Radisson. Clients have also asked for an aligned reporting format from the hotel industry “to enable them to compare apples with apples.”

Huijbrechts said Radisson always refers corporate clients to such programs as the Hotel Water Measurement Initiative and Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative, which she considers industry standards.

The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, another major sustainability initiative chaired by former President and CEO of Radisson Wolfgang Neumann, has 16 hotel companies as partners, among participants in other industries. Arabella Hospitality, which has 15 hotels across Germany, Spain and Switzerland with approximately 3,000 total rooms, recently joined the alliance at the end of February.

More transparency about sustainability at the booking stage is a win-win for corporate clients and hotels, Proctor said.

“At the very least, procurement functions expect to have information on sustainability efforts at hotels, including reporting on carbon footprint, and this is then increasingly being used as a decision point alongside price, customer satisfaction, safety and location on hotels being selected for inclusion to corporate accommodation programs,” Proctor said.

It won't be long until this type of transparency is everywhere throughout the hotel industry, Huijbrechts said.

“The majority of [hoteliers] are working on the display of green information on their own internal portals, as well as with their online booking tools, [such as] electrical car-charging facilities and green hotel buildings,” she said.

She added the hotel industry can assist corporate travel managers with what it defines as the basic level of hotel sustainability protocols, as well as providing a "pathway to net positive," standardized procedures and standards on such issues as transparency and ease of adoption.

Huijbrechts said she has clients who have ambitions to move more employees from air travel to train travel and ride-sharing trips to lower cost and emissions. She said much of this is being done in anticipation of business travel being less frequent than it was in 2019, although she acknowledged that trips on average will be longer than they were pre-pandemic.

While there is corporate concern for the wider sustainability picture, Huijbrechts said there is currently far more focus on internal company reduction of carbon emissions.

Zapata said each hotel has a different carbon footprint per guest, because they each have different levels of energy consumption and percentages of renewable energy sources.

Huijbrechts said business travelers could take longer to adopt personal budgets for carbon footprints, or limit what types of activities they do while on a business trip.

“Their travelers’ actual booking behaviors or actions whilst they stay with us might take time to change," she said. "They also want to see what they contribute themselves and are thus asking for more visibility in the hotels when it comes to what we do, such as locally produced food and smaller plates to reduce food waste."

Initiatives at Radisson include 100% carbon-neutral meetings, with the hotel firm offsetting the entire carbon footprint at no cost for clients and attendees, and the ability for individual travelers to offset room nights via loyalty points. Huijbrechts said Radisson works with two carbon-offsetting organizations, First Climate and Carbon Footprint.

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