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Several of the world's largest hotel companies have collaborated with purchasing organizations and sustainability-ratings platform EcoVadis to launch the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement. The initiative recognizes the importance of partnering to create standards that will serve the industry and more effectively move the needle on sustainability efforts. The founding members include hotel giants Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Radisson Hotel Group, as well as hospitality group purchasing organizations Avendra and Entegra.
The goal of the alliance will be to accelerate sustainable practices through this close collaboration with trading partners, which will increase transparency as well as standardization and allow the industry to more easily scale across purchasing chains.
"As companies seek to engage their value chain partners in their sustainability efforts, they realize the complex scope, as well as common challenges, in their own sector," said Richard Eyram, chief customer officer at EcoVadis. "It is through partnerships and industrywide collaboration that the hospitality industry can maximize its collective impact. By joining forces, aligning focus and sharing best practices, HARP members can achieve positive outcomes that pave the way towards Net Zero targets and a more sustainable future for all."
Among the core challenges HARP seeks to address:
- Scaling up visibility by strengthening supplier engagement rate, starting with the supplier assessment
- Accelerating suppliers’ performance improvement curve
- Enhancing the relevance of those engagements with a focus on the industry’s key categories
The alliance will be using the EcoVadis sustainability rating methodology, scorecards and improvement platform. EcoVadis has been supporting sector initiatives since 2011, bringing together a group of companies in the same industry to address their common sustainability challenges, leverage synergies and share best practices. In this way HARP will be able to provide greater visibility across the hospitality supply chain and present the opportunity for all participants to align their priorities and target objectives. Industry suppliers will then get a coherent directive for improving their products and processes as well.
Given the collaborators, the alliance has good potential to shift supplier behavior, scale up responsible purchasing and improve reporting by hospitality companies, noted Shawna McKinley, principal of Clear Current Consulting, which specializes in sustainable solutions for meetings and travel. But it's likewise important that the platform is designed to support local, inclusive, regenerative tourism, she added.
"Broad-brush approaches like this can also make it harder for small-scale, local operators that meet sustainability criteria to gain a foothold as suppliers," said McKinley. "Keeping pathways open for local social enterprises for whom the cost of entry may be high will be important."
HARP suppliers must engage in a scorecard process to participate; they will then have access to additional capacity-building and engagement guidance to meet the needs of the industry, as well as to tools and best practices.
The seven founding members of HARP have collectively rated more than 2,000 suppliers ahead of launch and plan to keep expanding the supplier database.