Business travel consultancy Advito has developed a quantitative
framework to score hotels' sustainability efforts, designed to provide buyers
evaluation criteria particularly in the sourcing process, the company announced late last week.
For the new tool, dubbed the Hotel Sustainability Index, participating
hotels have provided Advito, which is the consulting arm of travel management
company BCD Travel, with sustainability-related information like carbon
emissions, water consumption and energy use among other categories, Advito
managing consultant for sustainability Amélie Losanes told BTN Friday.
Advito's goal, Losanes said, is to provide buyers—and
eventually travelers at the point of sale—with additional comparative
sustainability information to consider when evaluating properties for inclusion
in a corporate program.
"This is not a certification, it's a score," Losanes
said. "What's different than what is in the market today is that you'll
see very often that online booking tools, for instance, display the CO2 or the eco-certification.
But what we wanted to do was find a system that looks at travel data rather
than just CO2 or just eco certification."
The HSI takes into account not only carbon emissions, water
consumption and energy use but also eco certifications and initiatives like
recycling and use of single-use plastics. Hotels that are transparent about
their data receive credit toward a higher score, Losanes said. Scores are
offered in absolute terms but also in relative geographical terms, to allow for
comparisons among hotels in areas where energy use is higher, for example.
Advito will calculate scores for properties that do not
cooperate by using benchmarks derived from Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative
standards and its own Gate4 emissions-tracking measurement methodology. Those
hotels receive no transparency credit.
Losanes didn't specify the number of hotels from which
Advito has collected data for HSI but said the consultancy had worked with
BCD's preferred lodging chain suppliers, representing "all the big
chains," to incorporate their data.
"It's been a pretty big lift," Losanes said.
"We've been working on it for close to a year to be able to not just
gather the data, but we also wanted not to reinvent the wheel. The reason why
it took us so long to roll this out is we had a lot of consultation with our
partners, the hotel chains on the BCD side, to present them the model and what
we were trying to achieve. From there, they essentially validated that they
felt comfortable with us working in this way."
HSI data is available for BCD corporate clients to use for
free in sourcing initiatives. How they do so, Losanes said, will depend on the
buyer's perspective on sustainability.
"It would be just one more
factor that the travel manager can use," Losanes said. "We also will
provide in-depth analysis for top markets, which would be the role of a
consultant from the sustainability team, looking at hotels listed in the [request
for proposals] and providing in-depth information on those sustainability
initiatives so the client can make a decision.
"It depends on the maturity of
the travel program of the client and also the willingness to bring
sustainability into the fold," she continued. "But at first it can be
an education tool to see how sustainable the hotels are in a specific market
for a client, and then they can take it further if they wish to do so."
BCD is piloting the incorporation of HSI scores into its
TripSource online booking tool and plans to fully roll out such functionality
in the first quarter of 2026. The company also indicated a willingness to
provide the data to other OBTs, a process that also could be ready in the first
quarter.
Advito's initiative comes at a time of possibly diverging
views of the
value of sustainability initiatives in business travel, particularly in the
United States. Still, Losanes said it remains a key factor for most Advito
clients.
"We definitely see some shifts. It's a representation
of the political landscape, in the U.S. specifically," she said. "But
generally the clients we work with are all very passionate with sustainability,
and they are still keeping it on the roadmap. And even [if] the political
landscape may not be as open to sustainability today, I think sustainability is
here to stay. From that standpoint, I'm not really worried if there is a little
bit of a dip right now in interest, because global warming is very, very real,
and it will continue to become a priority."