SINGAPORE—Greenview has just released its 83-page Green Lodging Trends Report (GLTR), the leading global benchmarking study on sustainability best practices in hotels. First launched in 2016, the initiative seeks to assess and catalyze sustainability innovation and best practices and promote awareness of the state of sustainability across hotels worldwide. GLTR started as an annual exercise with reports published for three consecutive years from 2016 to 2018. GLTR shifted to a biennial exercise after the 2018 Report to capture trends over a two-year period. The intention of the GLTR was to track best practices that were being adopted less commonly to more commonly over time.
Plans for the 2020 GLTR were disrupted due to the Covid pandemic. As the hotel industry was still in recovery in 2021, the GLTR resumed in 2022. In the post-Covid era, sustainability issues are taking center stage for many hotel companies and hotels. This was evident by the greater interest and participation this year, with data received from about 27,000 hotels across 54 countries to deliver the latest insights on hotel sustainability best practices. The 2022 GLTR dataset is six times greater than the 2018 GLTR dataset.
The 27,000-hotel dataset was made possible due to the participation of many companies—ranging from Aimbridge Hospitality to Xenia Hotels & Resorts. There were two data collection methods; direct participation by responding to the GLTR survey on The Greenview Portal, Greenview’s sustainability data management platform and bulk data received from companies.
Participants Receive Benchmarking Report
Greenview assessed 75 best practices in the 2022 GLTR, including hotel profiles (geographic location, service type, STR chain scale and hotel type). The hotel profiles enabled further data dissections by each of the breakdowns. By participating in the GLTR, hotels receive a confidential, bespoke benchmarking report that includes a comparison of performance against peers based on the data available per hotel profile. Participating hotels also stood a chance to be featured in the GLTR for outstanding sustainability best practices.
The GLTR groups sustainability practices into themes (e.g., single-use plastic, climate action, community, etc.) with each chapter providing a summary of findings with deeper analytics and visual charts per best practice. All best practices are further grouped into these four categories based on the adoption rates calculated: Common practices (75 percent and above); Established practices (50 percent to 74 percent); Emerging practices (25 percent to 49 percent); and Innovative practices (Less than 25 percent).
The best practices incorporate the Hotel Sustainability Basics Initiative (“The Basics”), developed by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) together with its partners. It also aligned with some of the key criteria included in the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC). The GLTR serves to not only catalyze the uptake of common best practices, but also accelerate the adoption of innovative and emerging best practices so that they become more established and common.
In a second article, Green Lodging News will highlight some of the key findings of the report. Watch for that article later this week on this website.
Glenn Hasek can be reached at greenlodgingnews@gmail.com.
