Rezidor Hotel Group: Room for improvement

The Rezidor Hotel Group manages a portfolio of five hotel brands including Radisson Blu, Park Inn and Regent. Globally the company operates nearly 370 hotels with over 78,000 rooms in almost 60 countries. Its rapid growth continued throughout 2008 with the opening of 33 new hotels.

On the front page of its 2008 Sustainability Report, released last month, Rezidor exclaims that “green is the new black”. Delving in deeper we aim to get to the bottom of whether green issues are taken seriously or are just a fashion fad for the burgeoning hotel chain.

The report doesn’t scrimp on information - at 30 pages of largely uninterrupted prose there’s certainly plenty to take in. However it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how much tangible progress the company is making and the few data that are reported are not particularly encouraging.

Some aspects of the report are confusing – for example the section on economic results and the unexplained table of “direct costs of responsible business”. At points it almost feels like the report is unfinished.

Projects

Highlights for 2008 include achieving eco-labels for 65 of its hotels, such as the UK’s Green Tourism Business Scheme, Ireland’s Green Hospitality Award, the Scandinavian Nordic Sawn label and the international Green Key and ISO 14001 standard. Another achievement was development of its ‘Responsible Business’ training programme that will be rolled out to all employees in 2009.

The company uses an online market platform, which allows registered buyers and suppliers to exchange information about potential products the hotel chain may want to buy. It is currently working on a feature that will allow suppliers to also display their own responsible business profile so hotels can make an informed purchasing choice.

Franchise dilemma

As the company manages the hotels rather than owns them the extent to which Rezidor can influence greenhouse gas emissions is limited, particularly where hotels are franchised rather than managed by Rezidor itself.

As explained later in the report “Many of the actions we need to implement require investments in the properties… this can mean that the property owner would take the initial investment cost”. It goes on to explain that the majority of hotels have informed their property owners about necessary actions and investments for sustainable renovation and refurbishing of hotels.

The group has also developed some Responsible Construction and Renovation Guidelines to be used at the beginning of new projects to make them more sustainable from the outset.

Muddled statistics

The section on environmental results has the strap line “environmental performance still improving across the board”. Unfortunately the reader can not be sure whether this is the case or not – figures on page 2 of the report show that energy use per floor space at both Radisson Blu and Park Inn has increased from 2006 to 2008. The graphs on page 17 then contradict these figures by showing an overall decrease in energy per floor space over the last two years.

There is more confusion towards the end of the report where the targets for 2008 are documented to have been a reduction of 5% in “energy consumption per guest night”. The actual achievement against this target is given in “energy use per m2”. Whether this is due to inadequate data management or a more favourable presentation of results is anyone’s guess. Either way it doesn’t constitute transparent reporting and furthermore targets for 2009 are not cited.

The report lacks signposting. The carbon footprint data for 2007 is hidden in some text generically entitled “emissions”. In 2007 the footprint from energy use for 178 properties was 325,119 tonnes CO₂e – a fairly substantial sum. Rezidor admits this is an increase from 2006 and 2005 but doesn’t say by how much. However a quick look at previous sustainability reports finds that in 2006 emissions from Rezidor’s operations amounted to 279,128 tonnes CO₂e compared with 222,372 in 2005.

The company’s climate change impact is undoubtedly increasing despite its aim of “continuously improving the energy-efficiency of our operations and… increasing the share of carbon-neutral energy sources”. Nice sentiment but the report doesn’t give any detail on the extent to which existing energy is from low or zero carbon sources.

Wider goals

Unlike many of its competitors, such as Marriott, Mövenpick and Mandarin Oriental to name a few, Rezidor has not committed to the goals set out in a report on climate change recently released by the World Travel and Tourism Council. The 10 actions set out in the report include an overall CO₂ emissions reduction target of 50% by 2035 and pledging commitment to work towards an internationally agreed framework of standards to measure progress against greenhouse gas emission targets.

In 2008 Rezidor joined the United Nation’s Global Compact (UNGC) which contains cross-sectoral principles relating to environmental protection (in addition to human rights, labour standards and anti-corruption). It will be interesting to watch how the UNGC influences Rezidor’s actions as it would seem pertinent for Rezidor to be involved in more tangible work with others in its industry.

With steps such as eco-labelling and training staff on sustainability issues Rezidor is obviously making an effort to address sustainability throughout the organisation. However to make real progress towards reducing its climate change impact indicators should be transparently reported for the whole organisation. The few data that were reported for 2008 were confusing and it is particularly disappointing that reduction targets for 2009 are not set out. To truly be a responsible business leader Rezidor should state an ambition to start decreasing its overall carbon footprint.