Hilton Develops LightStay to Measure Sustainability of Its Buildings and Services
With a few notable exceptions, the travel and leisure industry has generally lagged behind other sectors with regard to the adoption of sustainability practices. Gradually, though, I’m noticing the tide beginning to shift as more and more hotels start to recognize the business benefits of a comprehensive sustainability platform.
For example, just last week Hilton Worldwide announced that it is has developed a proprietary system, called LightStay, to calculate and analyze the environmental impact of its hotels.
By 2012, the company says it will require property-level measurement of sustainability for all 3,500 properties within its global portfolio of brands –-making Hilton Worldwide the first major multi-brand company in the hospitality industry to mandate that type of accountability. Consequently, measurement of sustainability performance will become a brand standard, on the same level as service, and evaluated accordingly as part of regular, property-level reviews.
LightStay takes into account energy and water use and waste and carbon outputs associated with building operations and services provided at Hilton Worldwide properties. As part of this, the system measures indicators across 200 operational practices including housekeeping, paper product use, food waste, chemical storage, air quality and transportation.
This project has been in development for two years, and in the first full-year of findings, the 2009 LightStay results show that the 1,300 Hilton Worldwide properties using the system:
- conserved enough energy to power 5,700 homes for a year,
- saved enough water to fill more than 650 Olympic-size pools,
- reduced carbon output equivalent to taking 34,865 cars off the road,
- and saved hotel owners an estimated $29 million in utility costs in 2009.
LightStay also includes a “meeting impact calculator” that measures the environmental impact of any meeting or conference held at a Hilton Worldwide property. This enables meeting planners and corporate travel managers to consider the environmental impact of hotel stays and meetings when making purchasing decisions. In addition, it provides corporate customers with the opportunity to include meeting impact data in their own sustainability reporting.
