GLOBAL REPORT—You’ve seen the hang tags or placards near the bath towels urging hotel guests to kindly reuse the towels to help conserve water…or perhaps you’ve noticed the low-flow toilets and showerheads installed in the bathrooms of a property.
Every little drop of water counts. It’s clear that hotel brands are squarely focused on water stewardship, but in order to gauge the impact of these efforts, it’s critical to have a good measurement strategy in place—and the willingness to act on the data.
The International Tourism Partnership (ITP), a member organization seeking to drive responsible business within the hotel industry, in partnership with member hotels, has launched the Hotel Water Measurement Initiative. It has set voluntary standards, which include a detailed guide for measuring usage and driving awareness and action on the issue of water.
The standardized guidelines were created by and for the hotel industry and underscore the group’s commitment to analyzing and then improving outcomes for water usage, according to Fran Hughes, director, International Tourism Partnership.
“With water, some of the concerns are increasingly the need to engage in water stewardship and understand scarcity is a pressing global issue. What do we need to do to be responsible stakeholders? We need to look at water more as a local issue and scarcity is happening where we’re operating,” said Hughes. “There are hotels not measuring or not doing it consistently. You need to have a solid foundation, one that is agreed upon and publicly available.”
With transparency an important part of the process, this methodology is free and available to any hotelier who needs it. Being accessible and communicating widely as a sector is part of the organization’s effort to help educate and raise awareness about water usage globally.
“Our members are located anywhere from Las Vegas to Hong Kong and all share a desire to come together to work on key challenges in the social environmental arena, recognizing these issues are too big for one hotel company to tackle on their own,” said Hughes. “We work on the corporate level, not with individual hotels. We are like an industry association driven by a mission and results. It’s very proactive. We engage with corporate responsibility leaders and our member companies to co-create the agenda for the sector. Where do we need to share what we’ve learned? How can we work together to reach out to stakeholders to identify issues?”
Beyond educating the masses on environmental issues, ITP also converses with campaigning groups on key concerns and builds relationships. There is a strong commitment to understanding the issues and finding practical ways of tackling them one by one.
“We brought in KPMG as independent experts and did some research on common reporting frameworks, making sure we understood where we fit in with these and with the principal members who are already reporting. They’re quite open in terms of what a company can report on,” she said. “We looked at the framework and decided this is what we’re including in our water footprint in terms of sources and operations and this is how we’ll divide it up. This is how our customers want to see it and a useful way for hotels to communicate it.”
—Corris Little