Despite some pushback from certain parts of the world to the green agenda, the global momentum around hotel and business sustainability continues to move forward.
As is almost always the case and most definitely in hospitality, this agenda and goodwill come at a cost and are greatly influenced by legislation, said Katharine Le Quesne, managing director at hospitality advisory HoCoSo. Le Quesne is also a lecturer and course assessor at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership and Glion Institute of Higher Education.
She said the sustainability agenda has stumbled a little, but the direction of force remains in the right direction.
“When we came out of lockdown … [sustainability] was the hot topic of every [hotel industry] conference that we went to,” Le Quesne said on "The Upgrade: EMEA Hospitality News," a CoStar News podcast.
While the Trump administration has lessened the U.S. focus on green issues, that's not the case everywhere.
“The European Union because of the scale of its geography … It has led in many ways, [and] it has been at the forefront of a lot of decision-making, a lot of legislation that talks about climate reporting, that looks at plastics, that looks at, generally, emissions and, more importantly, decarbonization of energy networks and so on,” she said.
One concern is that in the present geopolitical situation, some people believe “sustainability has become a bit of a football to be kicked, [but] in some countries, not kicked into touch,” Le Quesne said.
But the Three Ps — people, profit and the planet — continue to be central to most hotel operations. And profit plays a huge role in sustainability efforts.
“In the case of hotels, upgrading refurbishment aspects so that [hotels] perform better from an energy- and operating-cost perspective means [sustainability] can translate into real financial returns,” she said. “There are two sides to this. One is that you can positively influence your operational costs. The other one is actually that we are talking a lot about long-term risk. When an investor is coming into an asset, they are saying, are we sufficiently future-proofed.”
For more from Katharine Le Quesne on green-washing, green-hushing and sustainability best practices for the hospitality industry, listen to the podcast embedded above.