Over the past few years, I have devoted considerable passion and time to advocating for sustainability in travel and hospitality. As an industry, we do much more than generate returns for owners and operators of real estate assets. We also create jobs and career opportunities for nearly anyone willing and able to work. Travel and hospitality are among the rare employment sectors that touch so many diverse people and communities. It is truly a people-centered and people-dependent industry, and that is increasingly rare. It is also something I personally feel privileged and humbled to recognize and appreciate.
Today, conversations about sustainable hospitality and travel run the gamut and involve many stakeholders. This makes our hospitality and travel industry a powerful place from which to speak about accelerating sustainability across society.
The public is becoming more aware of shifts in weather patterns and the growing frequency of damaging events such as heat waves, droughts, storms, fires and related disruptions. Businesses are also becoming more attuned to significant volatility across expense categories. These realities seem to become clearer by the month, and acceptance is gaining momentum. At the same time, rapid innovation is creating new opportunities for sustainable technologies and solutions. I routinely look for important examples and like to highlight those that can help meet the moment.
Because the travel and hospitality industry touches so many parts of our society, it has a unique ability to influence our collective future, for better or worse. We are also discovering that we have choices about how that impact will continue.
Positive Impacts
When it comes to positive impact, decades in hospitality have taught me that meaningful sustainability efforts require focus. Hospitality is a 24/7 business with deep historical roots, and effective change requires structure, prioritization, and smart planning.
Energy management and energy-saving innovation have become leading focus areas, largely because of economic volatility and rising costs. This work also benefits from more mature technologies that have existed for roughly a decade or longer and continue to improve. Energy solutions are also less visible to guests and many staff members less directly connected to day-to-day hospitality operations in maintenance, which can make their impact harder for stakeholders to understand, let alone appreciate. Still, the industry’s operating culture has a genuine interest in moving away from its longstanding dependence on fossil fuels, which has helped.
Today, fossil fuels feel somewhat like tobacco: Unless it is your job to say otherwise, few people are making banners to promote using them. Yet transitioning away from a resource embedded in our economies and daily lives for generations cannot happen quickly. Smart technologies and innovation are helping that transition accelerate, as measured by investment and impact across hospitality real estate.
At the same time, rising energy demand brings legitimate ongoing concerns, including growing cost volatility, the power needs of artificial intelligence and data centers, and the broader shift toward electrification on a grid that was not designed for it. Hotels have historically been among the weaker commercial real estate asset classes when it comes to using, needing and wasting power.
Economic pressure and expense volatility are already affecting other key sustainability areas such as water rates, waste costs and property insurance. These issues are being discussed more openly and broadly, which suggests to me that businesses may engage formally to demand more predictability through thoughtful legislation rather than resist it or turn it into political fodder. Businesses need, and generally prefer, predictability over volatility. Sustainability discussions too often overlook business sustainability and viability; I hope I never fail to keep both in view.
Table Stakes
For all these reasons, beyond simply doing the right thing and acting responsibly toward our families, friends, neighbors, children, grandchildren and future generations—choosing targeted areas of focus is now table stakes for successful hospitality sustainability programs. Doing so is not just getting certified by someone, instead you will need to accept that it has complexity to do it well. This reminds me of the old saying that, to build a solid brick wall, you must lay one brick properly at a time. Choosing the right bricks and building a foundation focused on impact feels like an easy parallel here.
Waste remains the issue I return to most often because, once you begin to see travel and hospitality through a sustainability lens, it becomes very difficult to look away. A major global hotel brand may have a thoughtful sustainability program, yet still hand guests single-use plastic water bottles at check-in, wrap room amenities in compostable packaging and place a small single-use plastic bottle of mouthwash on the same bathroom tray. That kind of inconsistency matters. If we are going to promote what we do well, we also need to be honest about the areas where we still fall so obviously short.
My personal sustainability journey continues to evolve, and it has changed how I make everyday purchasing decisions. For example, after yet another pair of fast-fashion, major-brand blue jeans wore out after a short lifespan, I bought a pair of selvedge jeans designed to last 15 to 20 years. I have also shifted toward clothing made entirely from natural fabrics. At the same time, I believe personal sustainability choices should be allowed to evolve without judgment. Some may say the better choice is to buy vintage clothing instead of new; others may see a focus on organic hemp, cotton, wool, and silk as excessive or expensive. For me, the point is simply progress, awareness, and making better choices one step at a time. The same is true for travel consumers who stay at our hotel and resorts as guests.
The data is clear: When given more sustainable choices, travel consumers increasingly make spending decisions that align with their personal sustainability values, representing a significant and growing market opportunity for the hotel business currently being left on the table today. Recent research and industry work from the global sustainable travel and hospitality nonprofit Travalyst, to travel giants like Booking.com, and Google reinforced this trend, showing continued traveler interest in clearer sustainability information and more sustainable travel choices.
Solutions
In my last article on waste, I tried to show that just measuring hotel waste invites operators to begin understanding the meaning of a circular economy. What comes out of a hotel starts with what the hotel chooses to purchase. Keep thinking about laying one brick at a time, and this concept becomes easier to appreciate—and increasingly worth learning more about. In focusing on measuring waste data, remains the critical place to start. When organizations focus on waste and waste data, valuable information enables intelligent hotel teams to plan, target activities and create goals with measurable impact. That is why I continue to highlight low-cost, high-impact waste-measurement solutions such as the one offered by Z3 Data, which fully warrants another mention here.
I am always looking for more new, interesting, impactful and practical sustainability innovations for hospitality that seem clearly ready for the market. Because I love and am fascinated by oceans, I will admit to having a favorite alternative to plastic straws and cutlery: a company called Strawfish. Strawfish uses upcycled marine waste, including discarded seashells, to make these items. I must credit Laurie, a hospitality professional with Marriott Vacations Worldwide, for introducing the product to her colleagues in the field. While I was conducting sustainability audits earlier this year on Hilton Head Island, one of her colleagues introduced this innovation to me. This story also illustrates another important point: one individual can make a meaningful impact by taking initiative and acting for the right reasons, even when no one is watching. I hope you do not mind the callout, Laurie. I find that kind of quiet leadership especially refreshing today, given how much self-promotion we see in the broader culture.
I was fortunate to build much of my hospitality career in luxury, full-service hotels and resorts that included food and beverage, meeting and conference spaces, catering, recreation, wellness and events. Because of that experience, when I encounter new innovations today, it’s easier to assess their practical impact, commercial viability, and go-to-market potential. These are the kinds of solutions I tend to highlight.
Another recent innovation introduced to me came from a manager of sustainability named Jack, another warrior in my sustainability orbit from the Ojai Valley Inn. This is a remarkably low-tech tool for commercial kitchens called CNSRV which could benefit perhaps with a better product name, but I digress. In many commercial kitchen settings, including leading culinary schools, students are taught that the proper way to thaw food is to plan and move items from the freezer to the cooler for the next day’s use. Having worked in some of the world’s great kitchens, and seen hundreds of others, I can say with confidence that this often is not what happens in practice. Very commonly, chefs run water over frozen food until it is ready to prepare, wasting significant amounts of water in the process.
The higher the restaurant volume, the more water is wasted. CNSRV offers a simple, low-tech solution that still uses water to thaw food, but does so safely and far more efficiently. It meets or exceeds food safety standards while reducing water use by more than 95 percent. Although it is somewhat newer to market, it seems like an obvious solution, and one that is likely to grow and become quickly adopted in scale.
In this piece, I have revisited the importance of waste data and metrics, especially through affordable solutions such as those offered by Z3 Data. I have also highlighted several recently discovered innovations, including Strawfish’s recycled marine-waste straws and cutlery and CNSRV’s water-saving kitchen solution. Now, let’s turn to larger-ticket opportunities and smarter ecosystems—mature, sustainable options that are not yet as widely used or as well-known as maybe they deserve to be.
Hotels and resorts, as real estate assets, operate on cyclical capital investment schedules. Some would say the typical replacement cycle for hotel-room case goods averages about seven years. In the broader market of changing brands, flags, hotel real estate sales, and hotel acquisitions, those additional factors are not included here. By case goods, I am generally referring to items that fall under furniture, fixtures, and equipment, or FF&E, as they are labeled on financial balance sheets.
Partners
In major markets such as North America, renovations support an enormous industry of interior designers, case-goods manufacturers, sales teams and project managers who help hotels complete work while minimizing the removal of hotel rooms inventory otherwise available for sale 365 days a year. It’s a complex dance, and it’s big business. As a simple math exercise, let’s assume there are 60,000 hotels in North America, each with an average of 150 rooms. This is not necessarily precise data, but it is close enough to be useful for illustration. If each hotel replaces FF&E on a seven-year cycle, and each year were the same—which could not be further from the truth—more than 8,500 hotels would replace all guestroom case goods each year. If each guestroom had just one couch, that would mean roughly 1.3 million couches being replaced annually, and guess where most of the old ones end up? One very special and unique group I found working in this space is The Refinishing Touch, headquartered in Alpharetta, Ga., and established in 1977.
What The Refinishing Touch does differently is refinish and refurbish as much furniture as possible for reuse. The company offers many case studies showing not only the sustainability impact of this approach, but importantly the cost savings available to the owners and operators of hotels when their businesses do the right thing. Once again, business viability and sustainability must work hand in hand to reach impactful scale. The introduction on their web site does better justice than what I could have written authentically so here it is. “Mario Insenga, the company’s founder, helped create an industry before eco-friendly business practices were part of mainstream thinking. After 44 years of owning and operating The Refinishing Touch, Insenga has helped redefine how the hotel industry thinks about managing existing assets.”
Those of us who travel a lot for our work, have all seen, and often joked about, the cheap furniture quality associated with fast-fashion mostly branded hotel interiors—items that too often end up in landfills rather than using refurbished higher quality furniture being the point here. That is an example of a Linear practice, the opposite to what a Circular practice would be, and that is a race to the bottom economically for hotel owners, and for greater societal interests in sustainability.
Can you imagine the global impact to landfills if the hotel industry made reuse a bidding priority for renovations?
Lastly, another recent discovery I find quite impressive is a company called Hydrametrics, based in Centerville, Minn. Rather than removing toilets and other porcelain bathroom equipment that is impossible to recycle, Hydrametrics rapidly renovates existing plumbing fixtures to achieve best-in-class standards for water use, while at a lower cost to hotel owners and operators. They keep heavy materials out of landfills, save hotel asset owners and operators money, and deliver a strong return on sustainability for their communities. It is encouraging that businesses like The Refinishing Touch and Hydrametrics have already existed for decades and are ready to scale.
In today’s pay-to-play environment, which if you know me at all, you know that I find offensive, it is long-due for innovators like these to just be more freely shared, something I am proud to do again here.
Sustainable Travel Facts
Booking.com’s 2024 Sustainable Travel research, based on more than 31,000 travelers across 34 countries and territories, reported that 83 percent of travelers said sustainable travel is important to them, while 75 percent said they wanted to travel more sustainably over the next 12 months.
Travalyst’s industry work focuses on bringing consistent sustainability information into mainstream travel decision-making so travelers can make more informed choices, including through certification and sustainability-data efforts with major travel and technology partners.
Google Travel allows hotels to display sustainability practices and eco-certification information on hotel detail pages, with hotel sustainability information self-reported by properties and eco-certification information connected to Travalyst-aligned certification standards.
Together, these sources support the broader point that traveler interest in more sustainable travel is real, but that clearer, more credible, and easier-to-understand sustainability information remains essential for turning guest interest into booking behavior.
Greg Poirier is the president of Xenia Hospitality Advisors.