Behind the Quote: Driving a Sustainable Future: IHG Hotels & Resorts Calls for Industry Collaboration to Champion Responsible Business Practices
Hospitality Net's Behind the Quote (BTQ) initiative aims to provide deeper insights and a more comprehensive understanding of selected stories published on Hospitality Net.
This time, Willy Legrand had the opportunity of diving deeper into a recent press release by IHG: 'Driving a Sustainable Future: IHG Hotels & Resorts Calls for Industry Collaboration to Champion Responsible Business Practices'. Willy posed three insightful questions to Catherine Dolton, Chief Sustainability Officer, IHG Hotels & Resorts who provided expert responses.
Can you shortly explain why partnering with Vision 2045 an important step in your sustainability journey?
The scale of our industry provides us with an important opportunity to make a positive impact on the world; but it comes with a challenge – the need to adapt our existing infrastructure to be more sustainable and ensure that, as we continue to grow, we do so in the right way.
We believe that IHG and the hospitality industry can be a force for good; but if we want to drive large scale change, it"s vital that businesses, trade bodies and governments also work together.
We partnered with the Vision 2045 campaign to create a documentary to show how travel and hospitality can be a force for good, showcase the sustainability work we"re doing and highlight the opportunities and challenges faced by the hospitality industry to make sustainable change.
It also demonstrates the reality of the collaboration required between IHG, our guests, colleagues, owners, NGOs and community organisations to deliver our goals and bring our Journey to Tomorrow plan to life in hotels.
What are examples of some of the tools used by hotel owners to measure sustainability performance?
We have set an ambitious 2030 target as part of our Journey to Tomorrow responsible business plan. To meet these, collaborating and working with our owners is crucial. We have several tools in place which are actively used by our owners to guide them in making sustainable changes in our hotels:
Hotel Energy Reduction Opportunities (HERO) Toolkit
This tool reviews a hotel's existing energy initiatives and infrastructure and recommends ways our owners can increase efficiency. It also provides information on the expected costs of these measures and potential energy and cost savings. Since we launched the tool in 2022, almost 650 hotels have used it to guide their capital spending. It is available across our EMEAA and Americas regions and will launch in Greater China in 2024.
Crowne Plaza Bruges is the perfect example of success with the HERO Tool. Having held a GREEN Key certificate for ten years, the hotel team is always looking for new ways to continue their sustainability journey. One of IHG"s recommendations on the tool was to install solar panels to the hotel but in Bruges, these were not permitted within the historic city. The information on the HERO tool helped the hotel engage in a dialogue with the City of Bruges, overturning the city"s policy on solar panels. Now, solar panels can be installed across Bruges in locations where they are not visible from the street.
IHG Green Engage
Every IHG hotel is given access to our IHG Green Engage system, our online environmental management platform, which helps hotel teams make greener choices, charts their progress, and measures and reports their energy, water and waste data. It also provides more than 200 green solutions to drive utility efficiency. Green Engage has been supporting our hotels to reduce their environmental impact since 2009.
Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs)
To drive decarbonisation, energy efficiency and cost reduction for our hotel owners, we have integrated many ECMs into our brand standards. We carefully analysed a range of different measures and options across different climatic zones to identify those that provide the highest energy savings for the quickest return on investment for our hotels. This has allowed us to initially focus on implementing ECMs with paybacks of less than five years into our hotel brand standards.
At IHG, what are some of the key sustainability metrics you expect from your hotel owners?
Both our Green Engage program and ECMs are central to how we measure sustainability progress for our owners. The metrics we track in Green Engage include energy, water and waste data and our ECM standards include measures for lighting controls, occupancy-sensing thermostats and heat pumps.
Every one of our hotels has an energy reduction metric, and we particularly focus on tracking energy usage. Having access to the energy data from Green Engage in particular allows IHG to form a wider set of hotel performance metrics which cascade up to group level, allowing us to make changes at scale.
