Our two major priorities are to create local economic opportunity and to work towards making a night with IHG more carbon efficient. Charity and carbon offsetting alone are insufficient to address the complexity and scope of these challenges. This is why you will see us focusing more on new and innovative approaches to how we build and run our hotels. Here are some of the highlights for this year:
Defining what a green hotel is and how we achieve energy and carbon reductions is centre stage of our environmental strategy. Our online sustainability tool, Green Engage, is being rolled out across our entire hotel estate in 2009 and has a potentially huge impact.
Our award winning Innovation Hotel, an online showcase of your green ideas, continues to attract attention and feedback from our many visitors to the site.
Our Global Headquarters in Denham, United Kingdom, is a real life example of sustainable building design. During 2009, we will be launching a ‘green room’ prototype in our marketing suite to act as a learning centre for our owners and general managers.
Our work to set up our IHG Academy is an innovative approach to supporting local communities while also supplying our hotels with a sustainable talent base.
For IHG, our CR strategy is not about merely reacting to the regulatory context within which we operate. We have a proactive approach to CR which is centred on creating new value for our business and our customers.
Innovation focused on developing improved ways of working is core to how we seek to respond to our environmental, social and economic effects. Read more in this section about the innovative initiatives IHG is working on.
Green Engage – Our industry leading Environmental Management System
In 2008 we rolled out the ESCAP Enviro environmental measurement portal to 74% of our owned and managed hotels. This is replaced by Green Engage. This important system allows hotels to enter environmental data for energy, water and waste on a monthly basis and provides common measures for monitoring and managing environmental performance. Please visit the environment section of this report for a full explanation of Green Engage and what we are hoping to achieve by rolling it out.
Green Aware
The central effort for us in terms of training for CR is through our Green Aware (About, Water, Air, Recycling & Energy) programme. In 2008, this course supported our CR efforts by providing a one-day class on how to make hotels more sustainable. The class was based on our Innovation Hotel concept and was designed to provide general managers, chief engineers, executive housekeepers, directors of operation and owners, with a better understanding of green concepts. By the end of 2008, about 500 hotel general managers and their staff attended a Green Aware session in the Americas.
During the day participants exchanged ideas on how to implement a variety of environmentally friendly techniques whilst assessing other areas of opportunity for improving existing eco-friendly processes. Topics of discussions included: water efficiency, improving indoor air quality, recyclable material management, energy efficiency, measurement, resources, creating an action plan, educating – employees, guests and suppliers.
In 2008, Green Aware subject matter was based on ESCAP Enviro and CR in a Box. For 2009, course material has been updated to introduce and instruct hotel staff to the benefits of using our Green Engage tool. In 2009 we will work to extend Green AWARE to all three regions.
IHG Academy
In China, we have developed the IHG Academies in partnership with a number of educational bodies to provide training to students to equip them with skills required by the hotel industry. These Academies operate in 10 locations, are supported by 24 partners in the region and in October 2008 there were 4,200 students enrolled on one of these programmes. We also now have developed plans for Academies in parts of Europe and the Middle East. Read more about this in our communities section.
United States Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency Project
IHG is among 24 companies selected by the US Dept of Energy initiative to move energy saving technologies from the laboratory into commercial buildings. The award of US$15 million in September 2008 brings together two US National Laboratories with private sector companies like IHG to achieve the target of energy savings of 50% above the standard set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning for commercial new-build and 30% for existing building retrofits. The best practice developed by this project should significantly contribute to our knowledge of approaches to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from hotels.
Corporate Responsibility at IHG’s new headquarters in the United Kingdom
After facing the challenge of outgrowing our existing offices in Windsor, Global IHG Headquarters (HQ) was relocated to a new site at Denham in September 2008. The new HQ was designed in consultation with our employees and with sustainability in mind. Suppliers and manufacturers demonstrating strong sustainability credentials were selected, as we were conscious of the environmental impact of our design specifications.
At the end of the project over 90% of waste was successfully reused or recycled, preventing almost 400 tonnes of waste ending up in landfill. IHG also helped reduce the project’s carbon footprint by supporting local suppliers based within 25 miles of Denham. The interior also features energy and water saving measures such as energy efficient lighting, solar panels in the car park, low flow plumbing, and zone metering.
As well as being a sustainability showpiece itself the new HQ contains new ideas too. As part of a marketing suite of demonstration guest rooms we aim to construct a ‘green room’ in early 2009 to test energy efficient and recyclable products from manufacturers and suppliers and establish if they would be suitable for IHG hotels. Our next report will include more information on the Green Room.
Commercialising our innovation
Our consumer insight in 2008 told us that the majority of our customers want to make choices that are better for the environment and communities, this is why we will work to commercialise our innovations further during 2009 in terms of our brands and services. The Innovation Hotel explores our ideas and latest thinking and asks for feedback on these from visitors to the website.
Innovation Hotel v2.0
Last year we launched our Innovation Hotel website, an interactive website which showcases ideas on how the hotel industry can implement sustainable practices in the design, development and operation of its hotels. Geared to our online guests and members of the public, this interactive website tool seeks feedback from website visitors, who are able to rate the innovations and provide comments and suggestions. The site has created a step-change in the quality of our communications to stakeholders.
The response to the website has been very positive; Visitor comments have provided us with valuable insight into what hotel guests think and IHG scooped two awards for CSR innovation for the innovation hotel.
