Holiday Inn 2012 Annual Report Download - page 36

34 IHG Annual Report and Financial Statements 2012
Corporate Responsibility
We believe that incorporating societal and environmental factors
into our business strategy and operations will play a vital role in the
long-term viability of our business and the travel and tourism sector.
Whilst tourism plays a large role in the world economy and is an
important source of wealth for many countries, our industry faces
increasing pressure to balance its economic performance with its
social and environmental impacts.
As a leading global hotel company, we are in a particularly strong
position to help make tourism increasingly responsible. That’s why,
for IHG, Responsible Business underpins all of our strategic
priorities. We aim to harness the role hotels play in society in order
to create shared value for our business, our guests, the environment
and the communities where we operate, whether that’s conserving
and protecting resources, helping local people build skills and
improve their employability or providing refuge when disaster
strikes. CR is an essential element of doing business responsibly.
Our CR ambition is to transform hospitality for more sustainable
communities and better lives. We work to find innovative ways to
build and run hotels that can fulfil our brand promises, tackle the
environmental and social challenges we face and create shared
value for IHG and our stakeholders.
We focus our CR activities in two areas that make sense to our
business and where we believe we can make the most difference –
the environment and the local community:
• Environmental sustainability – we drive environmental
sustainability through our online environmental management
platform Green Engage; and
• Sustainable communities – we create local economic
opportunity, particularly through the IHG Academy, and
we provide shelter when disaster strikes through the IHG
Shelter in a Storm Programme.
All activities are underpinned by the robust policy and management
foundations we have worked to build and strengthen since we set up
our CR function in 2006.
Our CR governance
Our Corporate Responsibility Committee, a committee of the
Board, was established in 2009 and is chaired by Jennifer Laing,
a Non-Executive Director. Our Corporate Responsibility Committee
Report is set out on page 57 and the Committee’s membership,
role, responsibilities and activities in 2012 are set out therein.
The Committee oversees that we have the right policies,
management and measurement systems in place to deliver against
our strategy. It met three times in 2012, focussing on the global
expansion of the IHG Academy programme, the activation of the IHG
Shelter in a Storm Programme, the ongoing roll-out of Green Engage
and our CR stakeholder engagement channels such as our online
Corporate Responsibility Report.
We have established further governance committees run
by members of the CR team to oversee globally-aligned
decisions. These include our Global Sustainability Council
and our IHG Community Strategy Committee, both of which
met during 2012 to discuss improvements to, and expansions
of, our key CR programmes.
Environmental sustainability
We are committed to designing, building and operating more
environmentally sustainable hotels, something we believe
is essential to being a Responsible Business and delivering
Great Hotels Guests Love. Through Green Engage, our online
environmental management platform, we provide our hotel owners
with a roadmap to develop and operate more sustainable hotels.
In 2012:
• in our managed and owned estate our three-year target
(2010-2012) was to reduce energy per available room by between
6 and 10 per cent; we exceeded our target with a reduction of
11.7 per cent; and
• our latest carbon footprint assessment revealed that we achieved
an absolute reduction in IHG’s global carbon footprint in our
hotels and corporate offices of 76,000 metric tonnes in a year.
Our online Innovation Hotel website helps us to envision what future
hotels could look like and how they might operate. The site allows
online visitors to tell us what they think of the latest sustainable
hotel concepts: www.ihgplc.com/innovation
Green Engage
The environmental impact of our hotels is managed through every
stage of the hotel lifecycle by Green Engage. Green Engage tracks
the use of energy, carbon and water and the management of waste in
our properties along with the associated costs. An important feature
in Green Engage is Green Solutions – over 200 actions a property can
implement to reduce its environmental impact. The programme
provides owners with advice on everything from picking a suitable
site and selecting the correct lighting for the hotel through to
choosing responsible cleaning materials and providing staff training
on environmental sustainability. Green Engage also provides the
ability for our properties to answer our corporate client sustainability
questions through its robust reporting feature.
Green Engage helps us fulfil our important commitment to doing
business responsibly and, in turn, this stops hotels losing money on
energy costs. Energy is the second biggest cost to our business – the
average IHG hotel spends over $500,000 on energy usage each year.
Green Engage can help hotels become up to 25 per cent more energy
efficient, so it makes both environmental and financial sense.
Business Review
Corporate Responsibility (CR) is a key part of our Responsible Business practices.
We treat it as a strategic business issue and therefore believe CR only makes
sense if it aligns to our Vision of becoming one of the great companies in the
world by creating Great Hotels Guests Love.