52: The New Rules of Sustainability Claims in Hospitality

The largest number of businesses that we work with are hotels and hospitality brands, which has been really exciting.

And, you know, some of those brands we've been working with for the entire journey, sort of five year relationships, which is incredible.

And we've also got some fantastic partnerships in that space.

So we work with other partners who are doing sort of similar work to us in the area that really help us to amplify what we do.

And a particularly exciting partnership that we have is with a company called Travelist that enables us to link our FuturePlus Impact Certified Accreditation with sustainability initiatives through websites like Booking.com, Expedia, etc.

I guess it'd be great if you could explain a little bit about that process for people that don't know and perhaps expand on how that works and how you would go through that process if you're interested as a hospitality brand.

All of the sort of major booking websites, you know, Booking.com, Google, Booking, Expedia, etc., as people may have seen, now have sustainability websites.

markings on them or sustainability labels to say whether or not a hotel is or isn't and they have been working with Travelist which sort of sits like an industry guardian is probably not how they would describe themselves I don't think and you know they can correct us if I'm wrong but They're really working across the industry.

It's an organization that was started by Prince Harry, actually, which many people may or may not know.

And essentially, they work as an industry guardian, making sure that data is shared within the industry and that there is comprehensive and cohesion across what's doing.

So we work with them as well as a variety of other sort of sustainability organizations.

labels and certifications and they have relationships with all of the major booking platforms and what it allows is with the incoming regulation which I think we're going to go into a little bit more is for hospitality business hotels etc to be able to say whether or not they are sustainable and Which means when you're booking, you can preference the kind of place that you want to go.

Or if you're going, you can understand, you know, if you've got to stay somewhere, you can understand what it is that they are or aren't doing.

The only way to get that moving into the future is through working with a label, a sustainability label like Future Plus for a hospitality brand.

in order to have the data verified, evidenced, etc.

So you can't just say that you're sustainable, you've got to be able to prove that you're sustainable moving into the future.

And all of the evidence that seems to be out there, I think some of it is a little bit hard to get.

But sort of booking.com, I think, did a survey a little while ago, and sort of 70 to 80% of people look for it.

How that affects bookings is really hard to tell.

But people are actively looking to find hotels that have the ability to display whether or not they have sustainability actions happening.

That 70% to 80% feels like a really high number, but if that's what the data is showing, that's fantastic.

Yeah, it'd be really interesting to know how that then flips into how many of those book because of it.

And that's really hard data to get, as you can imagine.

It's a lot of information.

But the fact that people are even sort of swayed or want to find out that level of information about a site is... definitely means that there is interest there.