Holiday Inn 2010 Annual Report Download - page 30

Business review continued
28 IHG Annual Report and Financial Statements 2010
Corporate responsibility
Corporate responsibility (CR) is central to the way we do business.
Acting responsibly creates value for our brands while helping our
hotels to manage costs, drive revenue and be prepared for the future.
It also keeps us in tune with the thinking of our stakeholders,
and supports our mission to champion and protect IHG’s trusted
reputation. Doing the right thing reinforces trust in our brands, builds
competitive advantage and strengthens our corporate reputation.
With over 4,400 hotels worldwide and almost 1,300 in the pipeline,
we have a tremendous opportunity to help make tourism
responsible, from the energy we use to the economic opportunities
we create in the communities where we operate. We work to
achieve this by treating CR as a strategic business issue, and an
integral part of our Vision to become one of the world’s great
companies through our core purpose, Great Hotels Guests Love.
Our approach
Our strategy is based on innovation and collaboration and our
CR Board Committee, formed in 2009, oversees that we have the
right policies, management and measurement systems in place
to deliver against our strategy. The Committee is chaired by
Jennifer Laing, a Non-Executive Director. It met three times in
2010, focusing on the role of hotels in society, our community and
environmental strategies, our response to carbon regulation and
a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)
endorsement for Green Engage.
Innovation
We develop innovative concepts and technologies, and we work
closely with our partners to find creative solutions to the challenges
we face. Rather than purchasing carbon offsets, for example, we
have chosen to develop innovative technologies, such as Green
Engage, and to implement practical measures to make real carbon
and energy reductions across our hotel estate. Our efforts were
recognised this year when we were awarded LEED endorsement
and the Carbon Trust Standard, for showing genuine carbon
reductions and a commitment to ongoing reductions.
Collaboration
Our stakeholders play a key role in helping us identify and tackle
our priorities. They include guests and corporate clients, hotel
owners and franchise holders, local communities, employees,
shareholders, suppliers, academic institutions, non-government
organisations, governments and industry-specific institutions.
We engage with them through forums, meetings, individual interviews,
surveys and our award-winning online Innovation Hotel, where
stakeholders propose ideas that contribute to the way we design,
build and operate more responsible hotels.
As a member of the World Travel and Tourism Council we work with
our competitors to share knowledge and resources, develop policy
and implement programmes that have a positive social, economic
and environmental impact.
During the year we collaborated with some of the world’s best
minds and institutions in order to revise our Community Strategy
and find the right strategic partner. We worked with Harvard
University, and with Business in the Community (BiTC) who
facilitated the set up of partnerships through which we deliver
IHG Academy in the UK. The IHG Academy is a public/private
partnership that helps us create local economic opportunities.
We provided quarterly updates to elements of our online CR report
this year. Feedback on our report shapes the way we report in the
future. In 2010, IHG senior management met with students from
Harvard University for an interactive critique. In 2011 we will
continue to keep the report updated and move to our second version
of the Innovation Hotel, a website which invites feedback on the
latest ideas in sustainable hotel design and operations.
Review of 2010
Our innovation and collaboration activities are focused on the areas
that make most sense to our business, and where we believe we
can make most difference in our communities. Our CR strategy
has two pillars:
• Environment – reduce energy in our owned and managed estate
by between 6% and 10% over three years (2010 – 2012) via the
use of Green Engage; and
• Community – generate local economic opportunities, particularly
through the IHG Academy, and provide shelter in a storm
through disaster relief.
To help our work, we have established committees to support and
drive globally-aligned decisions around environment and community.
In response to feedback from users, we enhanced the usability
of our industry-leading online sustainability tool, Green Engage.
We also further developed our online Innovation Hotel to make it
even more dynamic and interactive.
We signed up to the UN Global Compact, aligning our operations,
culture and strategies with 10 universally accepted principles in
the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.
This aligns with and supports our existing Environmental,
Community and Human Rights policies.
Reducing our environmental footprint
Energy is the second biggest cost to our business, with the average
IHG hotel spending over $500,000 on energy usage each year.
Taking measures to conserve energy makes environmental sense.
At the same time it helps our hotels to stop losing money on energy
costs, which makes good financial sense.
Green Engage is our innovative system, designed to help hotels
reduce energy costs, with hotels achieving energy savings of
up to 25%. The system, which has recently received a LEED
endorsement, allows hotels to track, measure and report on
their energy, water and waste, and recommends actions that
will cut energy bills without compromising the guest experience.
Over 1,000 of our hotels are registered to use Green Engage and
2,000 individuals are registered as users. Our aim is to have our
entire estate using it over time. In 2011 we will launch version 2.0
based on feedback from existing users. The new version retains
all the features and benefits of the original but is easier to use,
with better benchmarking.