Corporate Responsibility

Green Engage

Green Engage is our Group-wide online sustainability management system

David Jerome, our Senior Vice President for CR, explains how the system works and how it is playing a key role in helping IHG achieve its CR goals.

What is Green Engage?

Green Engage is our comprehensive online sustainability system. It tells our hotels what they can do to be a 'green' hotel and gives them the means to conserve resources and save money – by measuring, managing and reporting on their hotel energy, water and waste consumption, as well as benchmarking and the ability to create action plans to track progress. We believe this offers a huge advantage to owners for whom energy is the second largest cost in their hotels. It also puts us in a strong position to respond to rising energy prices and any future carbon taxes IHG and our hotels may face.

Green Engage proves the value of our commitment to innovation and collaboration. We look for better ways to manage our carbon footprint than merely offsetting emissions and we engage with our partners to create a 'green' culture where owners actively explore solutions that enhance their business.

In 2011 Green Engage became aligned to LEED making us the first hotel company to have an existing hotel programme aligned. Find out more about our LEED alignment of Green Engage.

How does Green Engage work?

Hotels input their site data into Green Engage. The system automatically generates reports and an energy benchmark so that hotels can compare their performance to other hotels. Green Engage then provides 'green solutions', advising both new-build and existing hotels on the specific actions they need to take to reduce their impacts, depending on their climatic location. Finally, the system produces reports which allow IHG to review an individual hotel's progress.

Green Engage provides owners with advice on every aspect of the hotel lifecycle from picking a suitable site, to selecting the correct lighting for the hotel through to choosing responsible cleaning materials and providing staff training on sustainability. The return on investment, carbon reduction and potential impact on our guests is calculated for each action item suggested.

What kind of benefits is Green Engage bringing?

Green Engage can help our hotels be up to 25% more energy efficient. So far over 1,700 hotels have signed up to the system. If all the hotels in our 4,400-strong portfolio achieved 25% in energy savings, the estimated aggregate savings for hotel owners could be over $300 million.

We believe Green Engage gives us a significant competitive edge. It makes our hotels cost-effective and ultimately allows us to improve the value of service we offer our guests, who tell us they would prefer to stay in a green hotel. We also know that our Green Engage hotels are beginning to drive new business through their sustainability commitments. Thanks to Green Engage, IHG won a corporate contract worth 3,000 room nights – £300,000 a year over the next seven years.

Watch our video, aired on CNBC, and find out how two of our hotels are benefiting from Green Engage.

How does Green Engage integrate with existing green building certifications?

Green Engage is a point-based metric system, like LEED, BREEAM and Green Globes. These systems establish both a minimum level of sustainability and outline opportunities for improvement. But Green Engage goes further, providing ongoing tracking, reporting and analysis as well as point-based certifications. We believe this sets Green Engage apart in that it encourages improved performance and recommends solutions to sustainability challenges.

In some cases, Green Engage can be linked with external certifications. For example, hotels can earn credit in Green Engage by gaining certification with the Green Restaurant Association's Certified Green Restaurant® Program. In the United States and Canada, InterContinental hotels have committed to achieve this certification in all of the locations before the end of 2012. The following five locations' foodservice have already become Certified Green Restaurants®:

3 stars

• San Francisco Howard Street

2 stars

• Boston
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco Nob Hill
• Toronto.

This will make InterContinental the first hotel brand to have all of its locations in North America become Certified Green Restaurants®.

What next for Green Engage?

The original pilot went live in 2009. The system was quickly extended to our entire owned and managed estate and then opened up to any other hotels who wanted to participate. We had a good uptake and hope to maintain this momentum. In 2011 we developed version 2.0 of Green Engage, based on user feedback about making the system easier to use. Green Engage is an evolving tool and our dedicated Green Engage Council and Working Group will continue to recommend enhancements to the system. We appreciate that some of our hotels have limited resources for this sort of activity. To help them we will be making the system more intuitive with user-friendly functionality.

Throughout this site there are examples of how Green Engage is already benefiting IHG and individual hotels. We plan to report further during the course of the year on how more and more hotels are using Green Engage to achieve real benefits.

We will continue to roll out Green Engage to 100% of our owned and managed hotels and expand this further into the franchised estate.