Alongside its ethical motivation, sustainability carries business benefits for hoteliers, positioning them to attract more eco-conscious travelers and corporate groups with CSR objectives. So, technology that paves the way to sustainable operations is always welcome. Emma Cox, chief commercial officer at Boyertown, Pennsylvania-based ClimeCo, has worked in the sustainability and decarbonization space for nearly 20 years, and particularly within the last five years, she has witnessed an exponential increase in tech solutions. “I’ve seen sustainability initiatives evolve from being very manual processes to becoming very automated processes,” she said. “And I think that’s due to the need to make sustainability easy and drive demand in a turnkey way.”
Cox observed that many major hotel companies are prioritizing tech solutions that help them meet the sustainability requirements of their corporate clients, including decarbonization standards. “A lot of these decarbonization plans are very complex, and so hoteliers are looking for an easy solution to provide their customers,” she explained. “We have started to see a lot of demand in the space—hotel companies are coming to us asking for a tech-enabled solution to be able to compensate for the carbon emissions that the hotel is not addressing already.”
Digitizing Offset Purchasing
ClimeCo’s Digital Carbon Solutions exemplify tools that automate the calculation of carbon emissions—whether from an event, guest stay, or hotel operations—and carbon credit purchasing. “A consumer or a business can click on a button within the platform that says, ‘calculate my stay,’ ‘calculate my event,’ ‘calculate my travel,’ etc.,” Cox said.
The calculation is based on numerous data points, depending on the carbon footprint the customer would like to mitigate. For example, hotel stay data would include the number of nights, average electricity use per room, towel reuse plans, etc. “We try to make it as easy to fill out as possible; we don’t want it to be highly detailed,” Cox explained. “And then once that carbon footprint is calculated, it’s an easy transition to offset purchasing.”
The system then automatically invoices the customer, and the monies go toward supporting a sustainability project of choice. “We have a number of different projects within our portfolio, so the client can say, ‘I’d really like to support maritime shipping decarbonization,’ for example,” Cox said. “This has been a proven revenue driver for our hotel client partners.”
Customization is a key differentiator for ClimeCo’s solution. The Digital Carbon Solutions landing page can be customized for the hotel or brand, or ClimeCo’s API (application programming interface) can connect directly to a client platform. For instance, Hilton, a ClimeCo partner, has an environmental and community impact management platform called LightStay. “For them, it made sense for our API to hook in directly to LightStay,” Cox noted.
Future Directions
While the automation of carbon offset purchasing is a powerful advance in tech-enabled sustainability, Cox envisions ways to further enhance offsetting. For instance, the digital solution could be integrated with the hotel app, and, at checkout, the app would offer the guest the option to offset their stay. “Hotels ask you if you’d like your towels washed, so why can’t they also ask you if you’d like to offset your entire stay for a couple of extra dollars?” she said. “I could see that very easily being integrated, and I hope we see more adoption of that. I’d also love to see carbon offsetting integrated within loyalty programs. It would be wonderful to see those programs leveraging decarbonization projects as an option to use your points, and I think that would be fairly easy to implement.”
