State of Sustainability in Corporate Travel

State of Sustainability Report

The HRS report "State of Sustainability in Corporate Travel" explores HRS’ comprehensive Green Stay database to uncover multiple findings, offering in-depth insights into sustainable corporate lodging trends. Across the wealth of metrics, it is now clear that the marriage of advanced procurement and booking technologies – embedded with detailed sustainability figures from hotels – is driving the desired outcome: corporations working with HRS have collectively reduced the carbon emissions tied to their hotel stays by 27 percent through the first half of 2024.

Executive Summary

In the face of the global climate crisis and the urgent need to meet the targets set by the Paris Agreement, businesses are increasingly being held accountable for their environmental impact. With the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and similar regulations, corporations are under significant pressure to reduce emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050.  

With travel and tourism overall contributing 8% of the world’s carbon emissions and business travelers accounting for 20% of this, corporates and travel suppliers must act to reduce the impact of their activities. Business travel is particularly in the spotlight because demand has returned to pre-pandemic levels. For large multinational companies, Scope 3 emissions are responsible for up to 80% of a corporate carbon footprint, with business travel often one of the largest sources. Corporate travel has also changed its profile, becoming more purposeful. Business travelers are combining trips, staying longer in the destination and flying less in favor of rail. This means that the lodging segment can now account for up to 30% of a trip’s environmental impact.

As new regulations take effect, companies face financial risks and compliance challenges, particularly regarding how they measure, report, and mitigate their emissions. The traditional use of averages in emissions reporting is no longer sufficient, as compliance with stricter regulations will demand auditable and precise methodologies for greenhouse gas accounting.

>> Click here to download the report

Sustainable Hotel News Interview

The report looked at data collected from HRS’s Green Stay Initiative (GSI) database, and found that in the face of increasing scrutiny and legislation around emissions data, the corporate travel world is stepping up processes to address the impact of hotel emissions when it comes to scope 3 reporting.

HRS’s GSI database has sustainability-related data from hundreds of thousands of hotels worldwide, regardless of participation in GSI, that are procured and booked by corporations who work with HRS.

Fabio Fornari product manager for Sustainability HRS explained why GSI was launched in 2021: "Back in 2020, even during the pandemic, a lot of our customers started to request transparency on sustainability. ... Everything starts with procurement and setting up a strategy for procurement and negotiating with hotels and then when you put sustainability in that context, just having a tick box on whether a hotel has a certification or not is not enough."

>> Read the full article: "EXCLUSIVE: HRS’s State of Sustainability in Corporate Travel report"