Sustainability is a vulnerability for the travel sector. To get from A to B, you generally emit carbon, so it's always going to be a case of minimizing and canceling out rather than reducing to zero.
The hotel brands have been quite progressive in what they have achieved in terms of what they can directly influence: consumption, food waste and energy use. Where they lag is in genuinely understanding what the consumer wants. When I say consumer, I mean "consumers," because they are not all the same.
We identified six distinct segments of people, based on their attitudes and their behaviors. At the one end there are the green advocates, who will be challenging hotels to do more, but at the other end, there are the deniers, who think it's all a hoax. And in between you'll have people who want to do more, but can't because they are constrained by their situation and people who want to do more, but can't because they just don't know how to do more. And they need help.
Each of these distinct audiences needs a different message. If you go out there with one big green message it won’t land; you've got to be a bit smarter with how you go about it.
The message has to be nuanced. You can say to one person: "To save the planet, to reduce detergent use, please hang your towel on the rail, you can use it again," and there will be people who go along with that. There'll be others who will say, "Well, no, I'm in a hotel, I want a clean towel."
But those same people, if incentivized in a different way, might jump on the green train. For example, there is a hotel that offers guests the chance to take some complimentary items out of the refrigerator at check-in if they forgo housekeeping. This plays to a number of things and instant gratification is one of them. You get your reward immediately, and you’re not collecting points for a ridiculous target somewhere in the future.
Not everyone will go for that. Some want their rooms cleaned every day. It's about having different things that will appeal to different people to get them on that journey with you. And you can't do that unless you understand what the different groups are. Because if you go out there with just one message, you're not really going to land it.
We built a simulator which modeled choices, which is a better way of getting an indication of behavior than asking someone outright. We produced two identical hotel concepts and layered on different sustainability messages, adjusted the price and looked to see how that affected selection.
In the five-star market, there was 28% price differential in favor of the more sustainable choice, meaning that each hotel was chosen equally despite the difference. At that same percentage price differential in the three-star market, though, choices skewed far more heavily toward a cheaper, but less-sustainable hotel.
And that stands to reason. In the five-star market, you are more likely to have more disposable income and the price differential is not that meaningful. In the three-star market, that warm and fuzzy feeling of making the sustainable choice perhaps isn't worth the 28% premium, but it might be worth a 5% premium.
The reason we undertook this study was because return on investment is what ultimately drives decisions. There is legislation on the way which will force sustainable measures, but at the moment it is still a choice. And, because a lot of sustainable measures require investment, this adds cost, so we have tried to demonstrate a payoff — in addition to the existential one.
James Bland is managing director of the On the Move division at market-research and business advisory firm BVA BDRC, which comprises research teams specializing in hotels and hospitality, transportation and leisure and tourism.
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