At Holiday Inn Southend, we understand the importance of operating responsibly and sustainably – it is absolutely core to our business and culture. In recent years, we have made important progress in targeting operational, people-led and environmental issues most material to us, broadening our focus and our impact as part of our promise to provide True Hospitality for Good.
We are proud of our progress on what is a journey towards making an increasingly positive difference to our people, communities and the world around us.
Our goal is to:
Empower our people to help shape the future of responsible travel. Building on a culture of investing in our people, we focus on promoting wellbeing in the workplace; respecting and advancing human rights; and providing equality, inclusion and fairness for all.
How we are making a difference:
- Suppliers are required to comply with our Supplier Code of Conduct at the supplier onboarding stage.
- We continue to report our sustainability data to Ecovadis and CDP annually, and share this information with our corporate clients.
- As a member of the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (formerly the International Tourism Partnership), we continue to collaborate to tackle environmental issues and build hospitality skills.
- Through our IHG Academy programme, we engage with academic institutions across the Essex to supplement students’ classroom based learning and hospitality skills.
- We worked with local government to help hotels provide accommodation to those who needed it most during the pandemic, from frontline workers to the homeless.
The Green Tourism programme recognises the commitment of tourism businesses which are actively working to become more sustainable. Our Bronze award, acknowledged worldwide as an indicator of our good environmentally-friendly practices, forms part of our progress on a green journey.
IHG Green Engage™ provides us with more than 200 Green Solutions – sustainable and efficient actions that we implement to reduce our energy, water and waste, and minimise our overall utility costs and environmental impact. IHG make it a global standard for all hotels to utilise the platform and our progress is recognised through four levels of certification.
- Action plans and targets to reduce our impact on the environment
- Set and track our reduction goals for carbon, energy, water and waste, and demonstrate potential cost savings associated with our plan.
- Data provides customised environmental performance benchmarking, taking into account our hotel location, brand and outfitting
- Feed our IHG Green Engage certification status to our booking channels, allowing guests to make more informed decisions about where they stay.
Read an open letter from our CEO, Keith Barr here
Intercontinental Hotels Group
With hotels spanning more than 100 countries, we’re proud to be at the heart of our communities and recognise the opportunity our global reach brings to shape a positive future for local people and the generations to come. We will work to improve the lives of 30 million people in our communities around the world.