Hotel owners, operators or brands: Who is responsible for sustainability?

For more than thirty-five years our team has implemented on-site furniture asset management services to hoteliers across the United States and Canada. By refinishing, reupholstering, and re-manufacturing existing assets throughout hotels and resorts, we enable hoteliers to update their properties while staying within brand guidelines, lowering budget spend, carbon footprints, and guest room downtime.

As a leader in our market, we take time and effort to understand the individuals, businesses, and organizations we work with. So while attending this year’s IHG conference  alongside brands such as Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, EVEN Hotels, Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites, and Hotel Indigo, we took the time to run a detailed survey of the opinions around sustainability, furniture asset management, and general opinions of those that attended. We’re going to be publishing the full report later this month. You can sign up for a free copy here.

Out of the range of questions that we asked, one was about who is responsible for sustainability? We found some interesting results. Of the individuals that we surveyed, a fifth felt that the owner has responsibility for introducing and driving sustainable initiatives, while less than a fifth (16 percent) said that they thought the operator should be responsible. A slightly higher number, 22 percent, said that the brand should be responsible, while 41 percent said that introducing and running sustainable initiatives should be a collective responsibility.

We’ve done a huge volume of sustainable work with hotels. Brands, owners, and operators we’ve completed work for include the IHG brands named above alongside Hilton, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Hampton Inn, Homewood Suites, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Ramada Hotel and Conference Center, Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Marriott Hotels and Resorts, Renaissance Hotels and Resorts, Residence Inn, Four Points, Sheraton, Best Western, Comfort Inn and Suites, Econo Lodge, Hyatt, LaQuinta Inn and Suites, Quality Inn, Radisson, Red Lion Hotel, as well as many boutique and independent hotels.

While we see that the view of collective responsibility is good, and certainly a move in the right direction, we’re still surprised at how almost three-fifths of hoteliers and those working in hospitality think that environmental responsibility could successfully be the responsibility of one stakeholder: be it the owner, the operator, or the brand. We all face a huge challenge in addressing the need to be more sustainable in our day-to-day and business activities. In the hospitality industry this includes each hotel owner, every operator, and all brands. We know from the thousands of projects we have completed, that the best, most efficient and well-considered sustainability projects are those that are a collective responsibility – designed, implemented and driven by all stakeholders.

We will be sharing more of our findings from the IHG 2014 Conference, as well as advice to owners, operators, and brands that want to implement cost-efficient, responsible, and efficient furniture asset management solutions in upcoming posts. If you’d like to register for the full report and findings that we will be publishing later this month, please fill out the short form here.