Corporate clients are successfully reducing their carbon
footprint from hotel programs by booking more sustainable properties, according
to the latest data from accommodation platform HRS.
HRS said that clients using its Green Stay Initiative have
reduced hotel-related carbon emissions by 27 percent in the first half of 2024
compared with the previous year. Water consumption from hotel stays also
dropped by 4.6 percent over the same period.
This is one of the main findings of HRS’s new State of
Sustainability in Corporate Travel report, which looks at how corporate
travelers are increasingly booking hotels with lower emissions and operational
costs.
HRS said the reduction in emissions from hotels comes
despite accommodation accounting for 30 percent of overall emissions during a
business trip, which is an increase from 21 percent on pre-Covid figures.
The report found that booking more sustainable properties
also saved money, with 25 percent of the most carbon efficient hotels offering
average daily rates that were 17 percent lower than the 25 per cent most
polluting properties.
“As emission reduction rose on the list of priorities for
managed hotel programs, in too many scenarios travel procurement leaders were
led to believe that staying at sustainable hotels would cost more,” authors of
the HRS report noted. "There is now clear evidence that this does not need
to be the case.
“The correlation between a hotel’s progress on reducing
their emissions, capacity to digitally provide transparency on their
sustainable attributes, and offer better prices has multiple cascading
benefits.”
The report also predicts that the number of Green Stay
hotels being booked during 2024 is set to increase by 17 percent year-on-year,
with an estimated 8 million room nights throughout the year.
One of the major drivers in this corporate uptake of more
sustainable hotels is the implementation of government directives to reduce
emissions around the world, including the EU’s
Corporate Sustainability and Reporting Directive, which will
impact more than 50,000 companies by 2026.
HRS also found that regular business travelers who booked
more than 50 room nights per year had reduced emissions from their
accommodation by 14 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2024.
Less frequent travelers (10 to 50 room nights per year) cut
hotel-related emissions by 32 percent and those booking less than 10 nights
annually saw emissions drop by 26 percent.