Faculty & Research

Hospitality Leadership Through Learning

Sustainability Roundtable

October 27-28, 2011: Sustainability Roundtable

The international hospitality industry continues to move ahead with strategies for improving the sustainability of its operations, but participants in the latest Cornell Sustainability Roundtable agreed that it's time to counteract myths with truths and to address top problems. Proceedings of the third annual Sustainability Roundtable, sponsored by the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (CHR), are now available at no charge from the CHR. The roundtable proceedings, "The Hospitality Industry Confronts the Global Challenge of Sustainability," by Eric Ricaurte, detail the discussions at the roundtable, which was held in fall 2011 at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. The roundtable invited a balanced panel of 11 hotel industry executives, 11 academic researchers, and 7 industry consultants to focus on future directions for industry sustainability.

"Representatives of InterContinental, Marriott and Wyndham presented best practices and outlined challenges going forward. Other industry participants also shared their suggestions," said Ricaurte, a sustainability consultant who was co-chair of the roundtable. "It is critical for the industry to move past the myths that interfere with sustainability initiatives and to move ahead to address the barriers and challenges."

As presented by David Jerome, senior vice president of corporate responsibility at InterContinental Hotels Group, three critical myths are (1) that "green" is expensive, when in fact sustainable practices save money; (2) guests do not care about sustainability, when in fact many guests and group planners specifically look for "green" practices; and (3) hospitality firms can wait to implement sustainability programs, when in fact waiting is costing them both money and business.

Looking specifically at the meeting planner market, Susan Robertson, executive vice president of the American Society of Association Executives, pointed out that an increasing number of associations are seeking "zero waste" conferences and are working to offset their carbon footprint. Hotels need to show how they can assist meeting planners in those sustainability efforts.

The hospitality industry needs to overcome three major barriers to move ahead with sustainability programs. These barriers involve education and communication. The industry needs to educate and communicate its sustainability plans to external and internal audiences. Similarly, education is needed within the industry to ensure that sustainability is treated as a business issue so that it moves outside of its current "organizational silo." Finally, even as it becomes increasingly viewed as a business issue, sustainability must be viewed as a long-term brand focus rather than a reactive process.

"With a focus on cooperation between industry and academe, we can move together to overcome these barriers and advance the industry's sustainability efforts," concluded Ricaurte. "We have made great strides, and the industry is continuing to work on these issues."

November 16, 2010: Sustainability Roundtable

Sustainability Roundtable Program

Sustainability Roundtable Photographs

While guests and other stakeholders make it clear that they expect hotels and restaurants to improve the sustainability of their operations, hospitality managers are grappling with the many aspects of sustainability, including customer demand, cost effectiveness, supplier and stakeholder engagement, global trends, and system-wide implementation. The latest Sustainability Roundtable, held at Proskauer in New York City in November 2010 and produced by the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research, brought together corporate management, owners, operators, and suppliers to discuss those issues and myriad other aspects of sustainability.

Left to right: Rohit Verma, Professor and Executive Director, Center for Hospitality Research; Faith Taylor, VP Sustainability and Innovation, Wyndham Worldwide; Herve Houdre, Regional Director & GM, InterContinental Barclay

Chaired by Associate Professor Alex Susskind, of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, the session drew representatives from Marriott International, Wyndham Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), MGM Resorts International, Darden Restaurants, and Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, along with representatives from Schneider Electric, and several other companies with direct interests in developing sustainability initiatives (as listed in the program), http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/
research/chr/events/roundtables/ sustainability.html.

At the moment, sustainability is a moving target. The hospitality industry has ramped up its sustainability programs, but the issues at hand are rapidly expanding. One important way to improve industry sustainability is for companies to share best practices in general terms, Susskind suggested. "Most companies are willing to share 'general content' about sustainability," he said. "But the small, specific tactics and processes are kept secretive, which is what makes a hotel brand special." Faith Taylor, VP of sustainability and Innovation for Wyndham Worldwide, explained that what sets apart the sustainable hospitality movement is that hoteliers communicate not only with other departments in their own companies but also external stakeholders.

Roundtable participants agreed that hotels and restaurants have made substantial strides toward improving their operational sustainability. However, much of the "low hanging fruit" has been harvested (such as installing fluorescent lamps and low-flow showerheads). To go beyond that, the industry needs research into the best "green" practices, particularly those that contribute to the bottom line. As important as sustainability might be, businesses still must pay attention to profitability, said Dennis Quaintance, of Quaintance-Weaver. He added: "It's not sustainable to go broke." Quaintance demonstrated that sustainability elements added roughly 10 percent of cost in the design and construction phase of their LEED Platinum hotel and restaurant but they were able to subtract about 7 percent from design and construction costs because their integrated design process also produced construction cost savings, plus they save around 40 percent in utility costs from an operational perspective. "Sustainable programs must be a balance of idealism and pragmatism," Quaintance concluded. "That is what we do."

For restaurants, two of the big challenges are reducing water use and increasing recycling of waste streams. Barry Moullet, SVP of Supply Chain for Darden Restaurants, pointed out that small changes to practices at the unit level can bring big savings of resources and expenditures and a reduction in the company's carbon footprint. One challenge for recycling is the variation in regulations and programs. Some locations have sophisticated recycling regulations, but others have nothing at all.

Hotels are engaged in the challenge of retrofitting buildings, an effort that includes determining what standards to achieve. Corporate executives would prefer to work toward certification, but that is an uncertain target since so many certifications exist. Perhaps the most comprehensive area is sustainability reporting. Eric Ricaurte, principal of Greenview, outlined the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). This is a global organization that provides the world's "most widely used sustainability reporting framework," he said. GRI is accepted because it is not specific to a particular industry or issue, and its framework is providing the base for investment decisions related to corporate sustainability. He added: "It represents the intersection between investment and sustainability that we need."

October 29-30, 2009: Sustainability Roundtable

Sustainability Roundtable Program

Sustainability Roundtable Photographs

Sustainability Roundtable Proceedings

Participants in Cornell's first Sustainability Roundtable concluded that a major challenge facing the hotel industry is to define exactly what "green" means. Hoteliers looking to create a green hotel are caught in a situation where standards are inconsistent and consumers' views are unclear. Thus, hotels are sometimes reluctant to implement sustainable systems, especially given sometimes lengthy payback periods.

Left to right: Michele Diener, Director of Corporate Sustainability Strategies, MGM Mirage; Hervé Houdré, Regional Director of Operations and General Manager, Barclay InterContinental Hotel; and Lee Stein, Managing Member, Prize Capital, LLC

The Sustainability Roundtable, held in October 2009 at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, was produced by the Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) and chaired by Associate Professor David Sherwyn.

"Sustainability has emerged rapidly as an industry concern," Sherwyn pointed out. "Ten years ago, if we said we were going to have a discussion about sustainability, and if we told them that we were going to have a roundtable with twenty-five participants from top-level global companies, they would have told us we were insane. I credit three of our graduates, Eric Ricaurte, Walker Lunn, and Crist Inman, that we are now in a position to hold an annual sustainability roundtable."

While participants agreed that the industry needs to improve the environmental performance of its operations, most hotels encounter substantial barriers to implementation. Hoteliers still need to determine exactly which "green" hotel practices are most effective, for instance, and they must consider payback periods to demonstrate the value of financing such initiatives. Practices with a payback period exceeding three to seven years are difficult to contemplate and finance.

Consumers are the great unknown in this equation, particularly because they may conclude that some hotel practices amount to "greenwashing," which involves exaggerating the environmental value of certain hotel practices. In that regard, some hotel operators have quietly focused on the triple bottom approach to sustainable development, to avoid the greenwashing accusation.

Roundtable participants recommended that the hotel industry develop clear indices of sustainability, even though that means combining the sometimes competing interests of owners, management firms, and guests. This would be prudent however, given the alternative of individually addressing the national and global proliferation of regulations, standards, and certifications. "We have all heard that 'if you can't measure it, you can't manage it,'" said Eric Ricaurte of EnviRelation, LLC. "But managing all the measurements of sustainability is now just as daunting a task for the sustainability officer." Thus, participants suggested developing a "green bullet," a realistic measure of sustainability that would involve creating and sharing effective sustainability models to move the industry forward and to develop a realistic measure of sustainability.

As explained by associate professor Alex Susskind, sustainable operations is a key area of research at the School of Hotel Administration. Because of the importance of guests' opinions, the Center for Hospitality Research is working with Philips, a CHR partner, to assess the impact of sustainable operations on guest satisfaction at the Statler Hotel (the school's teaching hotel). CHR is also working with data from PKF Hospitality Research, a CHR friend, to determine the financial impact of sustainable projects, as explained by professor Rohit Verma, CHR executive director.