Alō Index
Founders: Anna Feinberg (CEO) and Leanne Turner (COO)
Headquarters: New York
Last Funding Round: In 2024, secured $1.9 million in pre-seed funding round led by Impellent Ventures, with participation from Techstars
Anna Feinberg
Gathering sustainability data from hotel partners traditionally has not been a huge challenge for travel buyers. Deploying that data to affect sourcing strategies, however, has been a different story.
A benchmarking study published by the Global Business Travel Association Foundation late last year showed that travel buyers, especially those in North America and Asia, on average are in the "planning" and "starting" stages of their sustainability programs. About a third of the 241 respondents in that survey said they used climate criteria in supplier selection, and while about half said they incorporate sustainability clauses in supplier contracts or plan to do so, only 6 percent had defined clauses with improvement requirements.
Sustainability in lodging has been a particular challenge, with a vast amount of data coming in from lodging partners in a variety of forms and formats, making comparisons a laborious task. That's the challenge Alō Index co-founders Anna Feinberg and Leanne Turner have sought to solve, collecting verified data directly from hotel properties, aligning that data with sustainable hospitality frameworks and using an algorithm to convert that data into scores and benchmarks for environmental, social and governance performance.
"Hotels are continuously providing a lot of data to enterprises during [requests for proposal]," Feinberg said. "Neither party until now have been able to actually use that data throughout the year to measure and meet targets. For enterprises, after an RFP they might have sustainability data for 5,000 hotels, but unfortunately, it sits on a shelf because they don't have the tools to leverage it."
With the index—which won honorable mention honors at BTN Innovate last year—hotels are compared across 12 categories, assessing performance not just for carbon footprint and water use but also for broader ESG criteria, such as in detecting and preventing human trafficking, accessibility and responsible sourcing, Turner said.
Currently, Alō Index—deriving its name from a Latin verb meaning to feed or nourish—has about 7,000 users in its system, representing 107 hotel brands as well as some independent properties, Turner said. Hotels participate because doing so can provide a way to ensure travel buyers understand the work they are putting in their sustainability programs as well as to see how they measure against their competition, she said.
"We offer that glimpse into how enterprises are making those decisions, and hotels can adjust and refine their sustainability strategy accordingly," Turner said.
Having that comparative data gives travel programs of all sizes the capability to incorporate it in their sourcing strategies, as well as those in various stages of deploying their own sustainability strategies.
"If you just need quick high-level data, buyers can get that in the platform," Feinberg said. "Others are using this tool much more in-depth to do real comparisons. We're pulling in transaction data for volumes and pricing, so now enterprises can see how hotels are ranking with that data included in the comparisons."
Alō Index soon should announce some "big partnerships" with travel management companies, Feinberg said. In addition, the company aims to launch in the first half of this year indexing for meetings and events, for which the demand has been high, she said.
"The M&E platform very similar to the way the transient platform runs," Feinberg said. "We pull in answers to questions specific to planning an event, whether it's a hotel that has meeting space or a standalone conference center or arena."