ITP promotes hotel carbon measurement

The hotel industry leads the way on consistent carbon measurement, they say.

"There are very few industries in which competitors have come together and collaborated to address the problem of inconsistent carbon reporting. Despite increasing concerns that carbon reporting is a ‘tick box’ exercise, non-comparable and ultimately informs little about the actual positive change a company is making, collaboration for the sake of a solution often seems a step too far. Writes ITP

As well as enabling consistent reporting, HCMI offers a real chance to advance awareness of environmental impacts and help people start to manage these better. Carbon reporting is moving from something which companies do on a voluntary basis to a legal requirement and companies who prepare early can be ahead of the game.

Robert McCann, Corporate Responsibility Manager, Environmental Sustainability at InterContinental Hotels Group states the three main benefits of having a common methodology across the industry to be enabling fairer comparison, saving time and providing greener meetings. He goes on to comment,

"IHG has built HCMI 1.0 into our online sustainability programme IHG Green Engage, which enables our hotels to measure, manage and reduce their environmental impacts and includes over 200 green solutions for our hotels to implement. Providing hotels have up-to-date utility and fuel data in IHG Green Engage and correct information about the hotel such as floor areas, then the carbon calculations are done for them by IHG Green Engage. Therefore, hotels are finding HCMI 1.0 very easy to use because we’ve been able to automate it for them – which was one of our key objectives when participating in this process. HCMI 1.0 will only be successful if it’s used at scale, and embedding in our tool enables just that."

WTTC and ITP member companies have agreed to have HCMI in place across their portfolios by the 2014 RFP season which is June 2013.

Fran Hughes, Head of Programmes at ITP comments, "We are working hard to embed the methodology and achieve maximum take up. We hope to increase the ‘supply’ of information by reaching out to other hotel groups about HCMI, as well as to travel management companies and global distribution systems to ensure they are aware that carbon footprint information is available and making sure it can be provided to the customer in the most straightforward format."

In order to achieve consistency across the industry ITP have recently engaged with existing travel trade associations and certification schemes. So far HCMI has achieved significant buy in from, amongst others, the Green Industry Meeting Council, American Hotel & Lodging Association, Ecompter, Green Tourism Business Scheme and the Irish Green Hospitality Programme.

For more information see http://www.tourismpartnership.org/what-we-do/products-programmes/hotel-carbon-measurement-initiative . You can request the methodology, free of charge, by emailing [email protected].

Valere Tjolle

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