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The BTN Group in early May announced the recipients of its inaugural BTN Group Sustainability Awards. HRS CEO Tobias Ragge was voted by a panel of managed travel industry professionals and sustainability experts outside the travel industry as the 2023 Business Travel Sustainability Champion for his and HRS’ work in putting forth the Green Stay Initiative, which creates standardized data points for the hotel community to convey their environmental conservation journey to business travel buyers and procurement professionals. The program gained traction in a cash-starved, labor-starved hotel industry in the depths of a pandemic and has gained momentum more recently across seven major hotel brands as well as independent hotels by offering hotels a clear “ramp up” journey to sustainability data transparency—all while keeping the program free of charge and the data open for hotels to use outside the GSI environment for other sustainability-oriented projects. Ragge sat down with BTN editorial director Elizabeth West to talk about the win and HRS’ continued strategic plans around the Green Stay Initiative.
BTN: First, congratulations are in order for being named BTN Group 2023 Sustainability Champion. What does that mean for you, and why is an award like this important to our industry?
Tobias Ragge: First and foremost, it shows the hard work that our team is putting into this is seen as valuable and addressing a very pressing topic in travel. It shows me we’re doing the right things. The recognition itself is very important for the team because at the end of the day, let’s face it, I’m the face to the outer world. Credit for the program needs to go to people like Martin Biermann, especially, who worked on so much of the intellectual property around the Green Stay Initiative and many others on the HRS team. You know, in terms of the work itself, I honestly never think of sustainability as having an endpoint, but just as a continuous journey. It’s great HRS got this recognition from the BTN Group and it’s a testimony to the importance of the work, but the work isn’t over.
The Green Stay Initiative is the bedrock upon which you were recognized. What has been HRS’ goal for the hotel community and for travel buyers in introducing that program?
Ragge: Prior to the pandemic, we saw momentum [toward] sustainable travel. So our supply partnership teams did the hard work to take hoteliers who might not always think about the importance of being on this journey, and convince them to give us at least 25 sets of data. Sometimes they don’t even know where to get it. Through [those data sets], you’re creating transparency, which is always the first thing when you don’t know what the result will be. On the other hand, it’s scary for a lot of people because they are not seeing this as an opportunity, but much more as a risk. What if the data is showing their performance is not good?
Since then has been the publication of the latest on Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in the EU, so there’s a lot of regulatory pressure for corporates to mitigate their carbon emissions, create transparency [in supply chains] and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by a certain period. 2040 is the climate pledge, but a lot of companies are now saying [they are tracking toward] 2030.
In that environment, [hotels] have to deliver sustainability data to their corporate customers. If you are not providing transparency—whether that’s through Green Stay or other initiatives—I think you will very soon no longer be part of large managed corporate programs.
So there must be demand from the buyers’ side for this. Is it just the organizational buyer, or is there also pressure from employees who want to book sustainable options?
Ragge: It is right now the early stage of providing this, but I would say for the economic buyer it’s a minimum criteria to take regulatory risk off the table for the corporation. For the employee, it’s providing the capability to do the right thing [when booking their business travel] toward maintaining a greener planet.
Siemens leverages Green Stay as an integral piece of its lodging program. They’ve also been collaborative and leaned in with you. How important is it to have a collaboration partner like that?
Ragge: Those partnerships have been instrumental … to create the success that this initiative has had. Because, quite frankly, when you go out and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this, this is great. But you have to provide the data,’ everybody is like, ‘Why? We don’t know where to get that data, it’s a big effort,’ etc.
That’s a normal reaction in the beginning, [but] to have strong partners say, “Listen, this is the direction we want to go and this is the direction as a procurement organization we are expecting from our partners.” Coming from a procurement as powerful and professional as Siemens was very important to also make suppliers understand why they needed to consider this.
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