Excerpt from CoStar
The hotel industry's Global Finance Committee has created a way for hoteliers to track their energy and water usage and waste output in a standardized way to create benchmarking metrics for all hotel types.
In a move to help hoteliers with sustainability efforts, a global committee is working on a way to help them better track their carbon footprint and enact metrics for use industrywide.
The Global Finance Committee, a co-sponsored committee created by the American Hotel & Lodging Association and Hospitality Financial and Technology professionals, has worked with the AHLA’s Sustainability Committee to create a new way to track, and eventually benchmark, hotel sustainability efforts.
As part of the upcoming 12th edition of the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, the Energy, Water and Waste section will break down and track hotels’ energy and water usage as well as waste production.
The new section of USALI will build on the Utilities Schedule 9 portion of the 11th edition of USALI, said Ralph Miller, committee member and president of Inntegrated Hospitality Management. The previous edition laid the groundwork for the EWW by creating operating metrics that would capture consumption data that the industry hadn’t tracked before.
“Now, some eight years later, we’re going to start using some of that consumption data in order to have a clearer picture of some of our use and broaden that so that we can classify that use better, whether its renewable or nonrenewable or any of the other classifications,” he said.
The Global Finance Committee includes major hotel brands, publicly traded and private owners, and academics, said Raymond Martz, committee co-chair and executive vice president and chief financial officer at Pebblebrook Hotel Trust. The committee includes international organizations, so there is a broad representation of the different stakeholders in the hotel industry.
When establishing sustainability metrics, the committee aimss to provide tools to individual owners who don’t necessarily have the resources of a global brand to allow them to track their energy, water and waste usage, he said.
The goal is to put forth a broad and detailed set of benchmark standards and metrics that every hotel can follow, similar to how the industry tracks occupancy, average daily rate and revenue per available room, he said.
This is the first time the hotel industry will have financial accounting to record these specific expenses and help guide decision-making, said Agnes DeFranco, committee member and professor at the University of Houston.
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