Sven Wiltink's View

What I do find essential is to link the progress of a business to both environmental limits and essential social needs, as captured in Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life's essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not overshoot pressure on Earth's life-supporting systems. For hospitality, this is particularly relevant. Our business has a significant impact on people — in operations, across value chains, and in the communities where we operate.

The practical bridge already exists. The Pathway to Net Positive Hospitality, developed by the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, connects planetary boundaries and essential human needs in one action-based framework. Net Positive Hospitality brings together people, planet, place and prosperity to create a better and more sustainable future for all: People — Respecting and enriching the lives of all our people; Planet — Replenishing resources and restoring biodiversity for a thriving natural world; Place — Working in harmony with our communities and ecosystems; Prosperity — Ensuring economic successes and opportunities benefit all. This is, in practice, a hospitality version of the Doughnut applied to our industry.

And it changes real decisions. A threshold-and-trajectory lens would ask whether a new hotel in a water-stressed region can operate within the local water basin's carrying capacity over its lifecycle. It would ask whether wages and conditions meet the social foundation in each specific context — leading to action such as offering education to those with limited opportunities, investing in community projects that restore nature and increase biodiversity, and strengthening human rights due diligence across the supply chain. For hospitality companies, science-based targets already introduce threshold thinking for carbon. The question triple materiality would force is: does our growth pipeline stay within our science-based carbon budget, or does the growth assumption itself overshoot it?

Within the DMA, impact materiality captures the now. It is then for a business to set its targets — science-based and others — to work within planetary limits and go beyond minimum standards toward meeting essential human needs. This needs to be done systematically if the industry wants to scale impact beyond individual initiatives. Verified Net Zero hotels and SBTi-validated near-term and net-zero targets are examples of how trajectory and threshold thinking can be translated into operational practice — one hotel, one community, and one decision at a time.

In summary

I agree that double materiality alone is insufficient as a compass for the direction our industry needs to travel. But rather than waiting for triple materiality to become formalized, the building blocks already exist: science-based targets for the ecological ceiling, the Doughnut framework for the social foundation, and the Net Positive Hospitality Pathway as the practical bridge between them. The challenge is not conceptual — it is operational.