Corporate Responsibility

With over 4,500 hotels globally, we have a big responsibility and a big opportunity to make a positive difference. A small incremental change across all our hotels can have a large impact.

Overview

Corporate responsibility (CR) is central to the way we do business. Acting responsibly creates value for our brands while helping our hotels to manage costs, drive revenue and be prepared for the future. It also keeps us in tune with the thinking of our stakeholders, and supports our mission to champion and protect IHG’s trusted reputation. Doing the right thing reinforces trust in our brands, builds competitive advantage and strengthens our corporate reputation.

With over 4,500 hotels worldwide and over 1,200 in the pipeline, we have a tremendous opportunity to help make tourism responsible, from the energy we use to the economic opportunities we create in the communities where we operate. We work to achieve this by treating CR as a strategic business issue, and an integral part of our vision to become one of the world’s great companies through our core purpose, Great Hotels Guests Love.

Our Approach: Innovation and Collaboration

We are focused on developing better ways to design, build and run our hotels. Our strategy is based on innovation and collaboration.

Innovation - we develop innovative concepts and technologies, and we work closely with our partners to find creative solutions to the challenges we face.
Collaboration - our stakeholders play a key role in helping us identify and tackle our priorities. They include guests and corporate clients, hotel owners and franchise holders, local communities, employees, shareholders, suppliers, academic institutions, non-government organisations, governments and industry-specific institutions.

Our areas of focus: Environment and Community

Our innovation and collaboration activities are focused on the areas that make most sense to our business, and where we believe we can make most difference, in our communities. Our CR strategy focuses on two main pillars:

Environment – reduce energy in our owned and managed estate by between 6% and 10% over three years (2010-2012) via the use of Green Engage; and
Community – generate local economic opportunity, particularly through the IHG Academy, and provide disaster relief through the IHG Shelter in a Storm programme.

Green Engage: helping us to deliver green hotels

Green Engage

Green Engage, our group-wide online environmental management system is helping our hotels to manage their environmental impacts.

What is Green Engage?

Green Engage is our innovative online environmental system, designed to help hotels reduce energy costs, with hotels achieving energy savings of up to 25%. The system, which has recently received a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) endorsement, allows hotels to track, measure and report on their energy, water and waste, and recommends actions that will cut energy bills without compromising the guest experience.

We’re the world’s first hotel company to be awarded a LEED endorsement for an existing hotel programme, Green Engage, further cementing our place as an industry leader in sustainability.

How does it work?

Hotels input their site data into Green Engage. The system automatically generates reports to help them understand their impacts. Green Engage then advises both new-build and existing hotels on the specific actions they need to take to reduce their impacts, depending on their climatic location.

Green Engage provides owners with advice on every aspect of the hotel lifecycle from picking a suitable site, to selecting the correct lighting for the hotel through to choosing responsible cleaning materials and providing staff training on sustainability.

Green Engage usage and update

Over 1,400 of our hotels are registered to use Green Engage and 2,000 individuals are registered as users. Our aim is to have our entire estate using it over time. We continue to invest in Green Engage and recently launched version 2.0 based on feedback from existing users. The new version retains all the features and benefits of the original but is easier to use with better benchmarking.

View our Green Engage video on YouTube.

For more information on Green Engage, please click here.

IHG Academy

The IHG Academy is a public/private partnership to provide education, skills training and employment opportunities to help drive economic growth in the communities around our hotel and corporate offices.

Our size and global market presence means we have a great opportunity to improve the lives of local people. As such, our Community Strategy outlines how we seek to create local economic opportunity through education, training and creation of employment opportunities. We partner with education providers and community organisations through which we deliver the IHG Academy, an innovative public/private partnership that helps us create local education and employment opportunities and drive economic growth. This is a truly sustainable business proposition. The IHG Academy helps to ensure the future of our hotels in areas where skilled employees can be hard to find and gives people the skills and access to careers that they would not have otherwise had. It provides our existing employees with a chance to participate and make a difference, and ensures we provide high quality quest experiences throughout the world.

Focusing on creating local economic opportunity puts us at the leading edge in our sector, giving us a competitive advantage and resonating with key external stakeholders, such as corporate clients. In 2011, we have expended the IHG Academy programme to the UK and the USA will continue the global roll out of this innovative model into 2012.

For more information on the IHG Academy, please click here.

Our key programmes

Green Engage – our online environmental management system.
The IHG academy – a public/private partnership that helps us create local economic opportunity.
IHG Shelter in a Storm programme – global disaster relief programme, including a strategic partnership with CARE International.
The Innovation Hotel – recently refurbished, the Innovation Hotel is an online showcase for sustainable hotel design technology. The ‘innovation hotel’ takes visitors on a tour of the model hotel of the future, pointing out practical solutions and technology that can make our hotels greener and more efficient, now and in the future.

Our Corporate Responsibility awards

LEED endorsement of Green Engage
Awarded Silver in the Business in the Community CR Index 2011
IHG named in Canada's 'Green 30' list 2011
Best 2010 Corporate Responsibility Report in the Travel and Leisure sector – Radley Yeldar
Worldwide Hospitality Award 2010 for our approach to sustainability
IHG has been recognised as the most environmentally and socially responsible hotelier in Australasia, after being awarded the inaugural Responsible Travel Management Award (RTM) by the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) 2010
National Business Travel Association (NBTA) CSR award 2009
2009 Hotel Visionary Award from Hospitality Technology Magazine for Green Engage
2009 CSR Innovation Award from Hotel Magazine
Eco-lodging Award at the China Hotel Investment Summit (CHIS)
Worldwide Hospitality Award for best initiative in sustainable development
Most admired leisure and hospitality company for the third year running at Management Today's Britain's Most Admired Companies Awards
Condé Nast Traveller 2009 World Savers Award for Willard InterContinental Washington DC.

Learn more about IHG’s corporate responsibility efforts and key programmes in our award winning Corporate Responsibility Report and join the conversation about sustainable tourism at our Innovation Hotel.