Moving the Needle on Sustainability: Cooperation in Hospitality

Erin Meezan

Chief Sustainability Officer at JLL

While early efforts at sustainability in the industry focused on lessening operational impacts like waste and energy use, or switching procurement to greener options, new examples are emerging that are redesigning the operations and value chain of hotels. One of the most exciting collaborations I've seen began in 2021 when Arabella hotels partnered with other hotels, a waste management company, plus others in the technology sector to address waste in their supply chain. This unique collaboration includes many partners working along a new supply chain model to reduce the environmental impact of food. A pilot model was established to create a more circular food system that started with hotels on Mallorca getting locally sourced produce, sorting their food waste, establishing a system to convert that into compost which then is given to local farmers, in turn allowing them to grow produce for various hotels on the island. The longer term aim of this unique collaboration is to impact the local agricultural systems on the island, making them more sustainable environmentally and economically, by delivering more value to both the hotel and the farming community. To find out more about Arabella Hospitality's sustainability, visit https://www.arabella.com/de/Nachhaltigkeit.

Glenn Mandziuk

CEO, Sustainable Hospitality Alliance

With the increasing familiarity with ESG in our business lives, there is a growing acknowledgement and respect for the interconnectedness between environmental and social issues. Our recently launched Pathway to Net Positive Hospitality rests on the pillars of People, Planet, Place and Prosperity, and understanding that we can only achieve true prosperity for all when our ecosystems, communities and destinations all thrive.

Improving one aspect of sustainability can open up new opportunities so that a positive impact can be enabled across more areas. Conversely, we need to ensure that reducing our negative impact in one area doesn’t have a knock-on negative impact elsewhere. For example, removing certain fish from menus to protect endangered species could negatively impact the livelihoods of local fishing communities unless they are able to diversify.

A ‘just transition’ ensures a fair and inclusive journey to a net-positive, resilient future where people and nature thrive. This concept of a just transition requires us to focus on the holistic impacts of our actions, and not address each issue separately and on our own. This requires us to be more collaborative in our approach – by including our local communities, including our workers, including our in-destination suppliers in our assessments and solutions. Ensuring that everyone has a voice in identifying the challenges, that we offer safe forums for their lived experiences, and that we are all being part of a shared solution that benefits everyone.

This is an area where greater co-operation and integration is still required within the corporate sector. Hotels are really at the heart of their local communities and we are seeing an increase in meaningful engagement from the sector. For example, Iberostar have introduced Destination Stewards into their team to voice the needs of the destination and help the company to adjust their net positive strategy to the context of the locations where they operate. We’ve seen similar examples of community engagement from Soneva. Drinking water on Maldivian islands can be an unreliable resource, with bottled water frequently required. Soneva Water was formed to eliminate imported plastic bottled water using a solar-powered desalination plant. Water is bottled in reusable, eco-friendly bottles, which are not only used by the resort, but made available to households, schools and local businesses, improving access to water for all.

As responsible businesses, we all need to work towards becoming a prosperous and responsible sector that gives back to its destination more that it takes. Designing this future will require the involvement and collaboration of diverse stakeholders working in harmony with our communities and ecosystems for a better and more sustainable world for all.

Swantje Lehners

Managing Director of Projects and Cooperations at Futouris e.V.

If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together" - this saying has accompanied our work in Futouris e.V. from the beginning. We are a partnership of tourism industry companies, working together to find and implement solutions to move that sustainability needle". We have seen a lot of progress in our projects, however we´ve also learned that while its a great first step to unite behind joint aims like eliminating plastic waste or reducing climate footprints, you´re getting nowhere if you dont actively support the concrete implementation in day-to-day business. Therefore our main focus is on creating hands-on imlementation tools for tourism businesses to realize change processes. Currently, we are working on a joint emission data platform, which will enable industry players to provide climate footprints of travel packages directly in distribution channels and give companies a practical instrument to analyse and improve climate footprints of their product portfolio. Only widespread industry acceptance and usage will make this effective.

The potential of cooperation to reach progress in sustainability is huge - but we need to focus on jointly taking concrete measures and picking up speed - going far & fast together.

Stefan Gössling

Research Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University

Here is my suggestion for co-operation, hot off the press as ongoing research: The best level to move tourism forward on sustainability is probably the destination (DMO), as this involves multiple stakeholders in a common goal. For this to happen, a sustainability manager is needed, i.e. someone knowledgeable about certifications, methodologies, and the pros and cons of different paths of action. The experience shows that even in just one or two years into a pro-sustainability push, political/firm opposition will dwindle, as benefits become apparent (saving resources = saving money; marketing benefits; consumer expectations; community common goals). Check the Austrian Climate and Energy Regions for a great example: https://www.klimaundenergiemodellregionen.at

Johanna Wagner

Co-Founder of La Belle EDuC, Founder of Upside Up Hotel Asset and Guest Lecture at ESSEC MSc in Hospitality Management (IMHI)

Collaborative nitiatives of small and wider scales are growing, which is necessary as trailblazing new ways of doing business and new ways of designing desirable travel experiences requires exploring as many new paths as possible.

With one foot in the industry and one in higher education, I'm among those who are trying to strengthen collaboration between these two worlds to mainstream the discussion and trigger action. This type of collaborations are powerful as they expose students to the relevance of sustainability knowledge and skills in the workplace while professionals can see how young graduates can help them solve emerging issues for which they are lacking the right competencies.

One of these collaborations I'm contributing to since its launch in 2020 is the French think tank La Fabrique du Tourisme. It brings together hospitality and tourism professionals and students as well as business leaders from other industries to work together during one morning twice a year and publish a widely-distributed report aiming at sharing practical tips, elements of context and requests for support from stakeholders (banks, government, hotel schools...).

Related article by Johanna Wagner

Benjamin Lephilibert

Founder & CEO, LightBlue Environmental Consulting

Since Food Waste represents on average ~50% of a hotel total waste, and knowing how poorly waste in disposed of/managed  in most places, targetting this issue with a collaborative lense seems of the most overlooked issue of all. To put is simply, hotels should strive to become ZERO FOOD WASTE TO LANDFILL players!

How? By following the food waste pyramid/hierarchy, which recommends to: a) Prevent food waste, b) Redistribute what can't be sold for human consumption, c) Transform when possible the unsafe remainings as animal/insect feed, and when these options have been used, d) find way to transform organic into compost or energy.

--> In this field, COLLABORATION PAYS OF!

Have a look at the Zero Food Waste to Landfill Mauritius project: https://www.thepledgeonfoodwaste.org/zero-food-waste-mauritius . 10 beneficiaries (8 hotels and 2 canteens), developped by LightBlue, subsidized by the government (HRDC), using The PLEDGE on Food Waste certification framework, made possible thanks to match-makers Living Labs Federations, and implemented in partnership with local food rescue organisation FoodWise.

Results? 62,147 KG of food not wasted, 209K USD in savings for adopters, 96 persons trained and 155 tons of CO2 equivalent not emitted thanks to this project.

Related article by Benjamin Lephilibert

Xenia zu Hohenlohe

Partner/Director at the Considerate Group

Most of us will know from any private or professional crisis we will have doubtless been through, that the task of solving a problem is always a lot easier when this is done in company rather than alone. Consequently, the need to start collaborating across business sectors and with other companies within one's own sectors, will not only help harness investments and accelerate much needed technologies, but will also enable us to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as allowing us to benefit from each other's skills & experiences.

One of our core values at Considerate Group has always been "collaborate" and we have successfully developed both our technology platform Con-Serve with this approach as well as delivered various of our consultancy projects in collaboration.

Within that vein we have now jointly launched the Hospitality & Tourism Task Force under the Sustainable Markets Initiative together with the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance as a platform to engage business leaders to collectively pursue sustainable solutions.

These type of collaborations can enable efforts around supporting sustainable suppliers to make our supply chains stronger, to setting sensible standards for measuring our impacts, to identifying investment gaps, pushing for needed policies and much more.

Elena Cavagnaro

Professor of Sustainability in Hospitality and Tourism at Stenden University of Applied Sciences

Cooperation is indeed needed and the amount of people and institutions to be involved is daunting. This is the reason why developing and then sustaining such cooperation is difficult.

One example, not by definition a best case, to illustrate my point. A camping in Friesland wishes to push the boundaries of circular economy by installing a 3D printer on site and use it to recycle plastic from the guests and the surrounding community into useful products. An amazing idea where environmental and social sustainability go hand in hand. Yet, under Dutch law timpossible to realize because the camping would then become a waste management company.

To solve this conundrum, a project was devised to bring together all stakeholders involved including the Municipality. The Municipality was enthusiastic but declined the invite: participating could raise the expectation that they would and could change the law. 

In sum: we should never underestimate the complexity of cooperation and the barriers of existing regulations. Therefore, flexibility in reaching out to stakeholders and courage to break with the existing status quo is paramount for successful cooperation in sustainability in hospitality.

Gabriel C. M. Laeis

Lecturer at IUBH International University

Hotels are always part and parcel of their destination. Therefore, a hotel’s sustainability performance hinges on its destination’s development agenda. Think of the relationship between a hotel’s scope three emissions and the availability of a sustainably powered public transport system, for example. To realise such initiatives, it takes cooperation amongst all tourism stakeholders, initiated and managed by destination management organisations (DMO).

Traditionally, DMOs looked after promoting a destination. More tourists = more consumption = stronger local economy was – and arguably still is – their guiding paradigm. In the light of a drastically changing climate, heat waves, droughts, sealevelrise and increasing biodiversityloss as well as changing consumer demands, many destinations will need a concerted effort to navigate the challenges ahead. DMOs are well-positioned to coordinate those efforts because they are strongly connected with all tourism stakeholders. However, their self-perception must change from being purely ‘marketers’ to becoming ‘sustainability guardians’ of their destinations. Along the lines of SDG 17, their mission as of now should be: ‘Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the local partnerhsip for sustainable development’. This includes, but is certainly not limited to:

1. Understanding and disseminating the upcoming changes caused by and risks associated with climate change and biodiversity loss as they pertain to their larger region.
2. In a grass-roots fashion, facilitate the creation of a sustainability vision for their destination shared by all tourism stakeholders and define the carrying capacity of their destination’s social and environmental systems. The GSTC destination criteria for sustainable destiantions are well-suited to serve as an initial guideline.
3. Foster cooperation between all stakeholders, hotels certainly being one of them, to act on the vision whilst staying within the limits of the carrying capacity.
4. Liaise between civil society, the private sector and political institutions to support a sustainable destination development.
5. Create and manage a centralised knowledge management and monitoring solution that tracks the ongoing realisation of the destination’s sustainability efforts and can serve as a basis for future decision making.

Ultimately, there is a delicate balance between promoting tourism growth and mitigating its environmental and social impacts. DMOs that prioritize sustainable tourism development can help ensure that destinations benefit from tourism in the long run while maintaining their unique natural and cultural assets.

Resources: GSTC. (2022) GSTC destination criteria. https://www.gstcouncil.org/gstc-criteria/gstc-destination-criteria/

Henri Kuokkanen

Associate Professor at Institut Paul Bocuse

Collaboration is essential in social and environmental sustainability, and misaligned interests can cause serious setbacks in efforts to become more sustainable. The need for such cooperation is particularly emphasized in tourism destinations that fight with various sustainability challenges, including those created by overtourism. Here, linking sustainability with revenue management and the theories used to explain motivators and barriers to cooperation in this field could also benefit sustainability. This is known as destination-based revenue management, and it employs behavioral game theory (BGT), a crossover between traditional game theory and the psychology-based domain of behavioral economics, to develop practical actions that can support efforts to foster collaboration. The games collected under BGT demonstrate that trust-based collaboration can be created with the right initiatives and even purely altruistic cooperation is possible. Subsequently, I see great potential in exploring the synthesis of these two fields and employing the outcomes in practice to sustainability of tourism destinations in order to alleviate the issues that could otherwise prevent or slow down collaboration.

Marloes Knippenberg

CEO of Kerten Hospitality

Collaboration and partnerships for sustainability is increasingly important as we as individual brands and operators, do not have the time to individually re-invent the wheel internally to use as a competitive advantage. As we have seen over the recent years, things are rapidly changing; demands from the industry/travellers, regulations, environmental changes and disasters, social unrests….

Sadly, we are lacking the time to keep sustainability as a competitive advantage. The solution is to turn to partnering and collaborating in sharing best practices and proven methods.

Just this past week at the Skift Lodging Forum in London we discussed that in order to achieve the 2030 carbon emission goals, there are reductions needed from the hospitality industry, up to 71% for some property types. This is certainly on the high end considering we have short 6,5 years left and still haven’t achieved a uniformity with standards and reporting requirements on exactly how to reduce those emissions feasibly on properties.

When we are thinking from operational tech for efficiency and sustainability, reporting platforms, metrics, carbon tools, social strategies – these have all already been invented by individual players and partners within and out of the hospitality industry. It is up to us to come together in agreement and alignment with sustainability and carbon reporting frameworks. To partner with the players that have already created the tools to excel sustainability, efficiency, and local social work on the ground.

There are a lot of complexities on the climate, biodiversity, and carbon topics as it relates to the hospitality industry. Are we effectively using cooperation? The lack of aligning across the industry on standards, frameworks, reporting requirements, carbon tools, makes it increasingly difficult to cooperate across the industry as companies, businesses are not aligned in our action plans. Sustainability encompasses a wide array of focuses and themes relating to the environment, communities, various stakeholders, locals, suppliers, social work, etc. which leads to different businesses focusing on different themes they deem either more approachable or more relevant.

However, can we pick and choose what we want to work on in the name of sustainability, when all around there is work to be done, and the environmental, social, and stakeholder/supply chain relations are all interconnected and affect one another? There is more that can be done on a local level when it comes to cooperating to drive actual social change and climate action. We should first strive to cooperate in setting industry wide standards that are adaptable per hospitality type, and the destination’s local context.

Reporting standards need alignment too. The way we incorporate sustainability into our business models and all hospitality process/services must be re-defined. It is a complete mindset change that is needed to further drive sustainability, where cooperation and collaboration is at the heart. Greater cooperation is needed as it relates to on-ground operational activity in increasing efficiency and further reducing impacts on the environment and communities. There are many possibilities locally in terms of building a supply chain and partner basis with the local community, businesses and entrepreneurs to further aid in social development. In many regards establishing such a basis of local businesses, empowering locals and providing the tools to grow their business to meet demands of the property locally, can be much more achievable if there is cooperation on a local level between companies to up-build the community we are all operating in. When we implement internally at Kerten Hospitality, our governance structure and how we approach the integration of sustainability, it is most effectively done when you start bottom-up. It is the people within our teams on the ground that are driving our operations daily, and managing any new sustainability process and implementations we are trying to push. We should exert greater efforts in making sustainability approachable and understandable at an operational level to empower our teams for them to push forward our efforts. We realized that our teams on the ground are the ones working day to day, experts within their departments and knowledgeable on the daily process happening on a property level.

So, we decided to make Sustainability and ESG more understandable for everyone working globally at varying hierarchy levels on property. This is how UBBU (United. Building a Better Universe) came to life. UBBU is an initiative which priorities locality, collaboration, the environment, efficiency, people, communities, all through team management and motivation.

For our sustainability initiatives to be successful and for further innovation to happen, we must include the people working daily in our teams and ensure there is cooperation on local levels.

With an aligned set of sustainable hospitality standards, guidelines, and reporting frameworks this can set the first stage for a more unified, cooperative industry which creates further platforms and opportunities for partnerships. We should all strive to connect and interpret climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, etc. to the industry and our teams on the ground in a manner that is understandable and relatable in each local context globally.

Megan Epler Wood

Principal, EplerWood International

• Are we effectively using cooperation in climate and biodiversity action to drive social change?

Efforts to achieve climate and biodiversity action to drive social change in the hospitality world have great potential, as hotels are at the center of destination ecosystems which can work together with regional planners to better understand how to manage regional impacts. Our team at Cornell STAMP has been working on the actions required to manage destination wide accounting since the publication of our 2019 report on Destinations at Risk, The Invisible Burden of Tourism. Our findings are that hotels and other tourism entities seeking to meet global targets for lowering GhG emissions and conserving biodiversity could effectively cooperate on data management with destination management units, that could become part of either Smart Cities, Regional Planning Offices, Local Authority offices, or Destination Management units.

Overall our on-line course on Sustainable Tourism Destination Management lays out the methods we recommend for data collaboration, that will allow for improved regional planning. We recommend central repositories for data management on the tourism industry, as it relates to accounting for the Invisible Burden of Tourism, thereby helping local authorities to measure and manage their resources effectively for both residents and visitors while also setting up the right framework to report on meeting national goals for the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal. My colleague, O'Shannon Burns, Program Manager at Cornell STAMP wrote a terrific article on this regarding How smart city innovations can power the future of sustainable tourism management. This gives an excellent overview of how to use existing efforts to manage data at the regional level to leverage efforts of industry to improve sustainability. Have a look! While using Smart City technology to measure and manage tourism at the local, regional area is still new, it appears to be an important pathway to assist hotels with creating actionable social and environmental change. Our course on Sustainable Tourism Destination Management provides data templates for destination managers to work on indicators that could, in theory, incorporate the Net Positive pathway goals published by the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance. We look forward to discussions about this in future.

• What are the possible areas where greater cooperation is needed in the sector to advance sustainability performance?

We at Cornell STAMP have successfully tested public private data gathering programs that could make the tourism industry more capable of acting at the regional level. Such data gathering systems would improve sustainability performance by managing data at the pre-competitive level, to improve the performance of all tourism facilities at the destination level. Our tests were on Djerba Island, Tunisia with GIZ support and now on Block Island, Rhode Island, U.S. with support from the Harvard School of Public Health.

• What are examples of best practices in regards to cooperation in the greater tourism and hospitality sectors? (providing information on the challenge tackled and outcome)

Research on Djerba Island and Block Island demonstrated that it would be feasible to harmonize data gathering on resource use, biodiversity, and climate-change related impacts at the destination level working with the hotel community, and that such cooperation could feasibly reduce environmental impacts of tourism and create solutions including "awareness, efficiency and compliance at the local level." Our Harvard report on the project in Tunisia is found here. Our report on Block Island will be published in an upcoming book;

Handbook on Managing nature-based tourism destinations amid climate change, Chapter Title: Measuring and Managing the Invisible Burden of Tourism on Block Island, Rhode Island In Press

Juliette Van Vleck

Student at Boston University

During my past few years at school, I’ve seen 1.5°C turn to 2°C and mitigation turn to adaptation as we’ve come to realize the toll of inaction on ‘Net Zero’ and other sustainability commitments. While the importance of collaboration across a business’s supply chain cannot be overstated, I believe there is an opportunity and need for internal alignment—an essential step for even making it to the starting line in the race to 'Net Zero.'

A company-wide commitment should include company-wide collaboration, which calls for an internal restructure around sustainability. Integrating sustainability into a company’s functional groups will alleviate the undue burden placed on sustainability teams, foster accountability, and pool expertise from each business unit—from R&D to Finance to Communications. A group previously centered around crisis management and compliance has quickly shifted to a more strategic, purpose-driven role—one that requires improved internal cooperation to work environmental stewardship into the strategy, operations, and culture of a company.

The UN Global Compact offers a ‘Roadmap for Integrated Sustainability,’ beginning with the following questions:

1. What functions are necessary to drive progress toward current sustainability goals?
2. What functions are perceived to be particularly influential in the company’s value creation?

Andreas Koch

Managing Director at blueContec GmbH

I do fully support the importance of cooperation, collaboration and coordination between multiple stakeholders. I even believe that this will be the decisive factor for our common future. This belief comes on the one side from my hope that we better learn to cooperate or even co-create - a value and characteristic that I often miss in tourism - and on the other side from my experience working for sustainable tourism projects that were aiming at this.

We were always successful in creating better cooperation, when we co-created visions for tourism regions or a number of tourism actors, that every member of this network full heartedly developed together and freely adopted. And this included regional governmental structures, marketing organisations, local suppliers and especially the employees of the involved organisations. Then it was also possible to radiate this spirit to many tourists visiting this region.

Let me give concrete examples: On Lanzarote and Crete, I had the pleasure to be at the side of other fantastic colleagues and experienced the power of creating sustainable food destinations hand in hand with all tourism actors mentioned above. Together with Maria Valerga, we summed up our learnings in a report (free download here: https://www.futouris.org/online-tools/).

Arjan van Rheede

Senior Research Fellow in Sustainability at Hotelschool The Hague

The question reminded me on Risk Society by Ulrich Beck. This book highlights the need for a new approach to managing risks based on cooperation, reflexivity, and sustainability in a context of complexity and uncertainty. Learning is a key ingredient and involves a continuous process of reflexivity and adaptation to new and changed insights and not only at an individual level, but also on group- and even societal level. Companies, citizens and communities, NGOs, governments and scientists and experts play an essential role in this collective learning process. These ideas have a high resemblance with resilience.

How to use these ideas to identify areas of cooperation for hotels? Previously I have referred to initiatives of the Frontrunner group on Circular Hotels in Amsterdam. They learned from each other, but also from cooperation with the supply chain to identify solutions. First initiatives to extend this sort of cooperation is already visible with hotels actively reaching out to residents(groups). The next step might also include cooperation on for instance local energy systems and cooperation with NGOs. Opening the conversation with more diverse actor groups will generate great opportunities for cooperation and progress to solve urgent topics.

Peter Varga

Assistant Professor at EHL Hospitality Business School

I am convinced that we need to strengthen cooperation between business, politics, academia, research and civil society, as is the case in Switzerland with the Sustainable Development Strategy 2030, which is an essential tool for harmonizing policies between stakeholders. However, while cooperation between stakeholders is essential, we should accelerate the sustainability transition agenda, as the "voluntary" effort of companies towards sustainability remains insignificant. This is why I believe that beyond cooperation, we need strong political decisions, such as the upcoming EU CSRD reporting obligation for large companies, which is a promising step towards transparency and accountability. The key question is how this obligation will be implemented: business as usual, or as a cornerstone for a more sustainable future?

Celine Vadam

Founder & CEO of WE(i) Think

The hospitality industry touches millions of people every day in various scenarios: guests, employees, suppliers, locals. It has a global presence and talks to people at every level of society. It is crossing different sectors through the lifecycle of hotel assets, as well as within their walls and required collateral services: from construction to food, transport to spa, cleaning to logistics, and so on.

This incredible reach associated to the multi-disciplinary nature of hotels are a real opportunity to spread the word widely to encourage more sustainable practices and implement best practices from each sector. This incredible reach associated to the multi-disciplinary nature of hotels is also a curse that creates a large range of scenarios and realities, a number of stakeholders with conflicting interests, a fragmented market from big chains to small independent structures, and various intermediaries with diverging priorities.

The hospitality industry is lacking a unified voice to effectively cooperate. Entities are functioning in silos, moving at slow motion and each reinventing the wheel where collaboration would make for more effective actions. Competition is not even an issue here, as the competitive advantage to implement sustainability measures is collective: destinations, landmarks, wildlife, and all that makes a location attractive can disappear if the collective is not working together. There is no competitive advantage for a hotel group to keep its sustainability advancement for itself, but there is collective advantage for hotel groups to collaborate. There is also value in cross sector collaboration: the hospitality industry is strong enough to initiate change and push other industries to do better. It is strong enough to empower employees and guests to be advocates of change.

Inter and intra industry collaboration is vital to accelerate sustainable initiatives: benchmarking, sharing best practices, aligning certifications and standards, training. Sustainability is not at a “good to have” stage but the emergency state where we stand today makes it mandatory.

This is the idea behind WE(i) Think co-founding the Hospitality of the Future Think Tank with Studio Puisto, bringing together professionals from all sectors of the industry: to share in a simple and effective way suggested action points hotels can explore to implement sustainability across departments and property’s lifecycle. Our action is a drop in the water compared to the amount of work that needs to be done, but we hope to inspire hotels, chains, developers, investors, architects, consultants with this year’s topics: Using Operating Agreements to reinforce sustainability measures ; Wellness beyond the Spa ; Inclusive hospitality ; Regeneration.

Maribel Esparcia Pérez

Managing Partner of the European Sustainable Hospitality Club

The challenge arises when we have tunnel vision about emissions reductions only. Critical issues, such as human rights and talent management, protecting local biodiversity, water scarcity, and responsible consumption in production, such as food waste prevention, receive far less attention (and they are interconnected). As hospitality stakeholders, we need to harmonize pathways, standards, and regulations to integrate behavioral changes into hotel operations. We also need to learn from each other's meaningful outcomes.

• Establishing contingency and transition plans involving local communities, public institutions, NGOs, hotels, and investors.
• Use technology to enhance communication between stakeholders.
• Reinforcing harmonious and collaborative relationships with guests, employees, local communities, the government, and competitors.
• Cooperation is based on the five Confucian constants of humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness.
• Understand local boundaries and thresholds through context-based impact management and measurement.
• Creating systems that allow nature, people, and resources to regenerate and flourish.

This study shows how the Collaboration of multinational companies (MNCs) with local hotels in developing country contexts. Sustainability logic developed in the headquarters is largely diffused to the local affiliate hotel, not all of them are. Decisions depends on GMs and hotels.

A great example of context-based impact is the Social project - Gratitud Pallars.

Willy Legrand

Professor at IU International University of Applied Sciences Germany

Cooperation, collaboration, and partnership have mushroomed in the post COVID-21 business environment perhaps as a response that ‘together we are stronger and more resilient’ and possibly since tackling the global polycrisis means ‘joining forces and resources’ in achieving a common goal. In fact, while cooperation, collaboration and partnership all have a slightly different meaning, all involve the willingness to work together towards a common goal.

The list of prominent examples of cooperation and partnership in the hospitality sector that aim to drive sustainability is long. In principles, we will find four major categories of cooperation that drives sustainability in hospitality:

1. Industry-wide sustainability initiatives: This is where we experience cooperation and collaboration between hotels, destination management companies, tourism associations, online travel agencies and suppliers to drive large-scale sustainability initiatives. An example would be the Hotel Sustainability Basics which is driven by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), recognized as a starting point of the Pathway to Net Positive by the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, partnered with Green Key and SGS and aligned with some larger existing frameworks such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s (GSTC) hotel criteria, the UNESCO/Expedia Pledge as well as destinations and large hotel groups[1].
2. Public-private partnerships: Through incentives such as subsidies and tax break as well as networking and knowledge sharing, collaboration between the public and private sector can help drive and scale up sustainability initiatives in the hospitality industry. For example, The Iberostar hotel group entered into a public-private partnership with the environment secretaries of the Mexican State of Quintana Roo, the Nature Conservancy and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) to development joint actions on coastal and dunes ecosystem restoration and share the outcomes [2].
3. Sustainable tourism networks: Networks can promote sustainable hospitality practices, share knowledge and best practices, and facilitate partnerships. The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance and Travalyst are prime examples.
4. Industry training and education: Cooperation between hotels and educational institutions is an essential step in transforming the industry to a more sustainable and resilient future. The partnership between the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education (ICHRIE) and the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance aiming at the advancement of sustainability in the hospitality industry is an example.

The David Suzuki Foundation, based in Vancouver, Canada, recently asked the question: Why do corporations exist? [3]. The answer, provided by the UK’s national institution for the humanities and social sciences, reads: To produce profitable solutions from the problems of people and planet, and not profiting from creating problems [4]. Industry cooperation can achieve several sustainability outcomes that a single company, with a set of solutions cannot, most notably addressing complex sustainability challenges that require collective action across the industry.

And that’s the power of business cooperation: Systemic Change.
References:

[1] WTTC. (2023, March 05). WTTC launches groundbreaking Hotel Sustainability Basics. https://wttc.org/news-article/wttc-announces-next-stage-of-its-groundbreaking-hotel-sustainability-basics-initiative

[2] Iberostar (2022). A roadmap to improving ocean and coastal health 2022-2030. https://waveofchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Iberostar_CoastalHealth_Roadmap.pdf.

[3] Suzuki, D., & Hanington, I (03 February, 2023). Why do corporations exist?. David Suzuki Foundation. https://davidsuzuki.org/story/why-do-corporations-exist/

[4] British Academy (2021). Policy & Practice for Purposeful Business: The final report of the Future of the Corporation programme. p.48. DOI doi.org/10.5871/bafotc/9780856726699.001