An Inside Look at Maritz's Sustainability Journey

While many in the meetings industry talk about sustainability, few are tracking and publicly reporting on their efforts on going green. Last year, third-party event management firm Maritz released its first-ever Climate & Impact Report detailing their 2023 carbon-emissions and environmental-action plan. This spring, the company published an updated report which shows its emissions dropped companywide by 11 percent in 2024.

The St. Louis-based company, which specializes in incentives and events, also is rolling out a companywide sustainability-education program this year, and now offers more than 400 environmentally friendly items in its rewards program. But more ambitious goals are on the horizon: Maritz has committed to reaching net-zero value-chain greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 (which means the company's aims to have its suppliers working on the same level of sustainability as they are), and has set an interim target of 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030.

In an interview at Meeting Professionals International's 2025 World Education Congress, Maritz COO Steve O'Malley sat down with us to discuss the past, present and future of sustainability in meetings and incentives. (You can read about how Maritz also is involved in the fight to address human trafficking here).

You've been with Maritz for 35 years. How has the company's approach to sustainability changed during this time? 

It wasn't really a thought back when I started in 1990. As with many companies in the United States, Earth Day was the only sustainability thing that got publicity. So our approach to it has evolved dramatically, and I'm proud of the work that we've done, but there's always more to do.

One of our five strategic priorities for this fiscal year is sustainability and how we can take our approach to the next level. We've been working on it ad hoc, I'd say, for over a decade, with green committees and things like that. But bringing on Rachel Riggs as our general manager of environmental strategy, and putting a team and a plan behind it has really focused us on the impact that we can have not only as a company, but also the impact our company can have on the industry.

What results are you seeing from these efforts to go green?

We just published our latest climate impact study, so you can see some of the progress that we've made. We reduced our corporate carbon emissions by 11 percent last year and our EcoVadis score is on the climb, which is a judge of how we're doing against our own sustainability targets. EcoVadis is also becoming essential to participate in RFPs for some of our business. So we're making the progress that we need to but it's going to be quite the journey.

We have a net-carbon statement and set a goal of 2050 — and I'm confident that we're going to get there. Much of our partnerships in the industry — whether it's airlines, hotels or convention centers — they're also partnering in that, and for us to be successful in achieving our target, we're going to have to work with the kind of suppliers that have that same commitment. So we're in consistent discussions with them, and we're looking at ways that we can favor the partners that have the right approach to net zero and do more business with them.

Our commitment is to keep investing more in sustainability because we are a fairly important brand in the industry, and I think that makes a statement that hopefully the industry will follow. Some of our clients are very mature in their approach to sustainability but others aren't as advanced, so our ability to help educate them is going to put pressure on the industry to move in the same direction that we're moving in. 

We've had some great success with some of those clients and have done a carbon audit of their events in order to help them improve year over year. We even have one client we're working with on their entire portfolio of events because they want to really amp up sustainability along every event they do.

Do you see the push for sustainability coming more from Maritz and the planning side or from the clients?

I think that it's going to be a little push and a little pull. A lot of health-care, pharmaceutical and even automotive clients are pretty far down that path in making sure their supply chain, including us, is abiding by the right steps to improve the sustainability of their business. 

Any of the customers we work with that have a European base are far ahead and have been doing this for quite some time. But we work with 2,000 clients on an annual basis, so some are much more sophisticated in this respect, while others are less so. It's incumbent upon us to educate our people as to how they create sustainable events and then go out and demonstrate to the client the impact it can have. It's going to be both, and we're committed to doing just that. 

What is your approach to sustainability for incentives? 

Incentives have the same kind of footprint and challenges that any event has. Generally, a bigger percentage of our incentives go to foreign destinations rather than domestic, so a big challenge we face there is the carbon footprint coming from longer-haul travel. 

We have been working with our airline partners to understand what their approach is, but we are quite dependent on how they are improving their carbon footprint. How we build an event on the ground is very much focused on what can we do to mitigate food waste and waste in general. We don't want to have tons of giveaways, even on incentive trips, because many gifts get left behind or end up in a landfill. It's really about providing choice to people — letting them pick from a gallery of options and even giving them the ability to take some of their award points and use them to support causes they care about. 

How are you feeling about the state of the industry right now?

I just left a panel with Mike Dominguez and Julie Coker where we were being asked about tariffs and how the headlines are all sort of doom and gloom. Across the board, between Julie, Mike and myself, we basically expressed great hope for our industry. These are all shorter-term issues that I think will be worked through the system. But what we're seeing is strength in the events business and strength in future bookings. In fact, I'd say that 2026 is still quite compressed. It's hard to find space to place business, and I think there's great optimism for face-to-face events.

We are not hearing of any clients that are saying, "We're going to take this event virtual this year." We've seen very little impact of attendance drops at Maritz. The only places that we're seeing an impact are on higher education or medical meetings, but our corporate business is quite strong. Even where we're seeing a dent, if you will, in participation at some of those meetings, the events themselves are performing from a revenue perspective exactly where the clients want. So I would just say a sense of optimism prevailed in that session. 

At Maritz, we have 6,000 events a year. We've had none cancel because of the turmoil that we're seeing. Of course, we're going to have cancellations, but it's going to be economically driven and/or strategy driven by either the companies or associations. A lot of what we do is domestic business, but many of our incentive programs do go internationally and that trend is continuing. So, the headlines might be a little bit worse than what is actually happening on the ground.

What other trends are you seeing in the market?

I think the employment market has actually shifted pretty strongly in favor of the employer. We just opened a director-level position for a brand-new client we're bringing on, and within three days, we had 125 applicants. We're seeing that fairly routinely now, where the demand for open roles very much outstrips the supply that we have. I think that's a good sign for the entire industry and shows the health of our industry. 

I'm also quite hopeful about the attractiveness of our industry to a younger generation. What I've seen is the younger generation that we've been bringing on over the past couple of years are performing exceptionally well. They have a heart for hospitality. They are enhancing how we approach things because they have a great sense of the importance of sustainability to what they're doing. We're all learning together how we can approach this and make the events industry better.