FRANKFURT, GERMANY—Accor unveiled its Carbon Optimizer for professional customers with an exclusive worldwide preview at the IMEX Frankfurt trade show. This tool will allow meeting and seminar organizers to know and cut their events’ carbon footprint. Accor is a leading player in meetings and seminars, with venues in roughly 2,000 hotels.
The Carbon Optimizer is interactive, user-friendly and combines a comprehensive set of variables, including the number of participants, the number of nights they plan to stay, how long the seminar will last, how big the meeting rooms are and the energy mix in the host country (the proportion of the various sources used to produce energy). It also factors in food services, i.e. the type of food and whether meals are buffets or table-served.
What makes Accor’s method original is that the calculators on the market often only measure emissions from production processes and energy consumption to power hotel equipment. Accor, however, includes indirect emissions associated with organizing seminars, i.e. waste treatment, paper and, especially, food which is a substantial source of carbon emissions. This way, customers will be able to choose menus based on their carbon footprint, and adopt more responsible choices.
Full Access by End of 2012
By the end of 2012, all Accor sales teams will have access to this tool to help their customers organize their seminars. The Carbon Optimizer was developed by Accor to meet its professional customer expectations. The guest survey that the Group ran in six countries and published in June 2011 revealed that 84 percent of business customers are sensitive to sustainable development—compared to 76 percent of all customers. Business customers are also more aware of large business firms’ responsibilities and 57 percent of them say that they take sustainable development into account when they choose a hotel—compared to 51 percent of the total. The environmental footprint report published by the Group in December 2011 provided all the necessary databases to build this Carbon Optimizer.
“Sustainable development is an opportunity for our customers and a decisive competitive advantage for our brands, in every country,” says Ludovic Dupont, Accor vice president Travel Agencies—Meetings & Events. “I am convinced that our commitment creates the sort of perception that nurtures customer trust and loyalty to Accor.”
The Carbon Optimizer is one step towards achieving the goals in PLANET 21, the new sustainable development program that Accor launched in April 2012.
“The ambition of PLANET 21 is to involve more our customers in our continuous-improvement drive on the sustainable development front,” says Sophie Flak, Accor executive vice president for Academies and Sustainable Development. “The Carbon Optimizer, an innovative tool packed with completely new calculation variables, is a step in that direction. It will allow us to work with our professional customers on sustainable offers for meetings and seminars in our hotels.”
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