2Sustain

Late last month, Hilton Worldwide announced an extraordinary partnership with Good360 to connect hotels donating high-quality used goods with charitable organizations that can then repurpose the items and use them to serve needs within their communities.

By utilizing LightStay, Hilton Worldwide’s proprietary sustainability performance management platform, all of the more than 3,750 Hilton Worldwide hotels globally will be able to enter goods available for donation into a tracking system. This tracking system will link to Good360′s online product donation marketplace, enabling more than 22,000 participating charities to claim items as needed.

Additionally, Hilton Worldwide’s group meeting clients can track donations entered by Hilton Worldwide-branded properties in the event a donation opportunity is available through LightStay’s Meeting Calculator.

“Our partnership with Good360 is the critical link we’ve been looking for,” said Jennifer Silberman, vice president, corporate responsibility for Hilton Worldwide. “Many of our hotels have been donating for some time, and we are excited to watch how this partnership will enable more donations by connecting hotels with a greater number of organizations to support communities in need and providing resources to facilitate their donations.”

Traditionally, hotels have trouble building effective relationships with existing charitable partners on a consistent basis due to time, resource or legal constraints. (more…)

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: (more…)