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HRS’ Green Stay Initiative Evolves & Expands Reach to More Hotels with Version 2.0

Launched in March 2021, HRS’ Green Stay Initiative represents a remarkable industry milestone as the corporate lodging community does its part to travel more sustainably. With government and investor mandates to reduce carbon emissions, corporations are openly seeking efficient technologies and services to help towards that goal. Accordingly, hotels across the globe have come to understand that the illustration of their “green metrics” in the procurement process will now play a key role in their candidacy to become a preferred supplier of prospective corporate clients. Both parties are aligned on the need for automation and efficiency to meet this challenge.

Building upon an unmatched array of APIs, matched with HRS’ knowledgeable on-the-ground experts and innovative technology, the Green Stay Initiative stands out for its quick traction across continents. Hotels in more than 170 countries now participate in the initiative, including more than 440+ prominent brands. Large multi-national chains, such as Accor and Marriott, signed on within months of launch. Corporations increasingly are mandating hotels to participate in HRS’ Green Stay Initiative as a prerequisite for preferred supplier status in 2023.

In an effort to build upon this success, HRS undertook an extensive collaboration period with corporate clients and hotel partners to find ways that Green Stay could be enhanced to further help clients and suppliers. We’re happy to announce that as of October, several of these enhancements are live and available for everyday use by buyers and suppliers.

“The HRS Green Stay Initiative provides us with a uniform global standard for measuring and comparing hotels’ environmental footprints,” said Thorsten Eicke, Head of Global Mobility Services at Siemens AG. “By implementing this initiative, we can now steer our hotel volume to support our ambitions for going green. This is a proven technology, and it’s clearly time to use these capabilities to serve our near-term and long-term sustainability goals.”

What is Green Stay?

HRS developed the Green Stay Initiative at the request of global clients who require transparent sustainability data to ensure they progress towards reaching their own internal climate action goals, as well as complying to government laws and regulations, e.g., the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Green Stay helps ensure that all hotels, no matter their resources or how far along they are on their sustainability journey, are able to comply with requirements from prestigious corporate partners.

In the procurement process, the displays provided by Green Stay can be used by stakeholders to optimize sustainability elements as they compare and contrast potential lodging suppliers. By selecting hotels with green attributes, travel managers can help reduce a lodging program’s environmental impact by featuring more green properties in their top destinations. Read the press release from HRS client, Siemens, a trailblazer when it comes to implementing new technologies to efficiently enhance their travel program has to say about Green Stay.

When booking, travelers can compare properties using the Green Stay displays and decide for the optimal supplier, regardless of it being part of the company’s program or from the spot market.

HRS Green Stay 2.0 Enhancements

After consulting with clients and hotel partners in the months after the Green Stay Initiative was launched, it became clear that not all clients had the same sustainability requirements and hotels around the world are at different stages of their own sustainability journey. To address this, Green Stay 2.0 shares a hotel’s current status based upon Green Stay’s unique measuring components. The three levels – Basic, Advanced and Professional – allow hotels to effectively communicate where they’re at as they progress on integrating more sustainable everyday operational processes.

Another major enhancement for our corporate partners is the backfilling of sustainability data when no data has been shared by hotels. HRS uses an algorithm that calculates those metrics based on averages on the actual data provided by peer suppliers that reported for similar properties based on location, size, age and services offered.

Green Stay Basic

Basic is the entry level for the Green Stay Initiative, requiring only a self-assessment with 10 qualitative sustainability questions. It is meant for hotels that have started on their sustainability journey but are currently unable to report on environmental footprints.

Green Stay Advanced

The Advanced level is achieved after the hotel has completed a self-assessment with 25 sustainability questions and an environmental footprint report on their Carbon, Water and Waste performance.

Green Stay Professional

The Professional level requires a self-assessment covering up to 80 sustainability questions, an environmental footprint report on Carbon, Water and Waste and third-party verification of this information by independent auditors.

Report, Reduce and Remove

Version 2.0 of the Green Stay Initiative provides all the data needed to support companies accurately report on the environmental impact of their hotel bookings. The structured data files in the technology facilitate newfound insights, helping companies measure by region, markets, business units and traveler segments.

The data can be used in triple-bottom-line accounting, supporting non-financial disclosure reporting on carbon emissions, for example:

• ESG ratings in the context of supply chain management
• Reporting under global standards such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

Aligning Procurement with Corporate Climate Goals

Lastly, Green Stay 2.0 enables an annual configuration by corporates for each sustainability indicator along the different levels of assessment. In addition, it is possible to apply a weighting factor per report year, thereby enabling additional value for the latest data provided by hotels. This way, corporates can assign weights on indicators that are more relevant to their climate targets, policies and commitments, which are then translated in HRS’ procurement platform with hotels achieving a score ranging from 1 to 10, according to what was configured.