Corporate clients are successfully reducing their carbon footprint from their hotel programmes 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 their hotel-related carbon emissions by 27 per cent in the first half of 2024 compared with the previous year. Water consumption from hotel stays also dropped by 4.6 per cent 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 travellers are increasingly booking hotels with lower emissions and operational costs.
HRS said this reduction in emissions from hotels comes despite accommodation accounting for 30 per cent of overall emissions during a business trip, which is an increase from 21 per cent on pre-Covid figures.
The report found that booking more sustainable properties also saved money, with 25 per cent of the most carbon efficient hotels offering average daily rates (ADRs) that were 17 per cent lower than the 25 per cent most polluting properties.
“As emission reduction rose on the list of priorities for managed hotel programmes, in too many scenarios travel procurement leaders were led to believe that staying at sustainable hotels would cost more,” said HRS. "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 per cent 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 (CSRD), which will impact more than 50,000 companies by 2026.
HRS also found that regular business travel travellers who booked more than 50 room nights per year had reduced emissions from their accommodation by 14 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2024.
While less frequent travellers (10 to 50 room nights per year) cut hotel-related emissions by an even larger 32 per cent and those booking less than 10 nights annually saw emissions drop by 26 per cent.