Introduction

Written in collaboration with the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance

The first step in your sustainability journey should be to set your baseline. This is a measurement of your current impact on the environment. It takes into account things like water and electricity, but also plastic use and carbon emissions.

Setting your baseline is important because it’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are now. Maybe your utilities bill is twice as large as it needs to be. Maybe you’re already using best practices when it comes to plastic reduction. Maybe there’s a better way to encourage guests to be less wasteful in their rooms.

You might be running a beachside bungalow or managing a multinational hotel franchise. No matter your property type, there’s a lot to be gained from setting your baseline in order to become more sustainable – both from an environmental and social standpoint as well as a financial one.

Take Hilton, for example, which began to measure and track environmental impact in 2008 using LightStay, its proprietary sustainability management platform. After the group set its baseline and began tracking change, it was able to pinpoint where it could make the most impact. Between 2008 and 2018, it reduced portfolio-wide energy usage by 22%, water intensity by 22% and carbon emissions intensity by 34%. The data yielded insights that allowed Hilton to save $29 million in utility costs – and that was after only one year.

In this section, we’ll cover the benefits of setting your baseline. We’ll also look at the tools available for measuring and tracking two key parts of your environmental impact: your carbon footprint and water usage.