Inge Huijbrechts on Making Sustainability Part of Hotel Operations

This exclusive interview with Inge Huijbrechts was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.

Inge Huijbrechts is Chief Sustainability and Security Officer at Radisson Hotel Group, where she leads its Responsible Business programme and work towards net zero. Her responsibilities span the environmental impact of hotel operations and the safety of the people within them.

Speaking exclusively to Sustainability Speakers Agency, Huijbrechts explains how she made sustainability part of the company’s strategy and why everyone from chefs to finance teams has a role in delivering it.

She also discusses earning the trust of guests and local communities, reporting progress honestly, and keeping people safe as climate change and conflict create new risks for hospitality businesses.

1. What can other businesses learn from your approach to reducing the hotel group’s environmental footprint?

Inge Huijbrechts: We have been quite successful in reducing our footprints in Rison Hotel Group. We published our new sustainability report today, which is a major annual event. There you can see that we have reduced our carbon emissions by 33% compared to our reference year, 2019, and reduced our water footprint in one year by more than 20%.

The way we are doing this is through a clear strategy and vision. Our decarbonisation strategy and targets are super ambitious, as they have to be. It’s decarbonisation by 2050, but that also means reducing our footprint by 46% by 2030, which is just a few years away.

The ambitious targets are there. Leadership buy-in is essential. In my world, sustainability is part of the company’s strategy. We have a five-year plan, and we made sustainability part of that from the very beginning.

When the new CEO and leadership team came to the company, the first thing I did was make sure sustainability was part of the corporate strategy. That connects it with all the relevant teams, whether that is the growth of the hotel portfolio, its technical design or finance.

This interconnectedness is really important. Then there are the other stakeholders, including our employees. How do we engage them with campaigns like Green Operations, Move to Zero, which we run regularly every year?

We engage them and make them shine in their daily work. Whether you are a chef, a front office manager, working back of house or an engineer, you can be involved.

The last big stakeholder group is the guests. How do we engage them? Guests create the drive for generating more revenue from sustainability. We do that by making sure all our hotels are, as a minimum, applying 12 actions on sustainability, which is like an entry-level sustainability label.

The guests want this. 84% of guests say they want to travel sustainably. If we can answer that, we’re talking effectively to them and covering all the stakeholder groups we need as partners in this net zero transformation.

2. How can businesses bring environmental sustainability, corporate ethics and governance into their everyday decisions?

Inge Huijbrechts: It’s all part of the same mix. In our world, it’s Think People, Think Community and Think Planet.

Environmental sustainability is Think Planet. Think Community is about meaningful interactions with the local community, and Think People is about caring for the people in our hotels and supply chains.

These things go hand in hand. If you are a responsible citizen in your community, you’re going to care about providing meaningful jobs that can be a multiplier for livelihoods in that community.

In many communities, even in inner cities, we are part of regeneration or tourism development as an international brand that is often the first to go somewhere. If you create meaningful connections in your community, you’re going to be better off in terms of acceptance, your licence to operate and your resilience. It’s part of what any company needs to do.

Thinking about people means thinking about your employees and customers. Customers are very conscious about the choices they make in their daily lives: the way they buy, travel and live, and the products they need. Younger generations are especially conscious about brands and the purpose behind them.

That also counts when they become employees. Applicants today want to work for a company with a purpose. I think about 75 or 80% of applicants say they look up a company’s purpose before they apply.

It’s a 360-degree view of being a meaningful, sustainable company with a purpose.

Governance and compliance are about transparency, building trust, being real and truthful about the progress you make, and having the systems in your company to support that. I don’t think governance can be missed in the ESG equation either.

3. What are the biggest safety and security risks facing hospitality businesses, and how can they prepare?

Inge Huijbrechts: We live in changing and challenging times. Things that were part of governmental warranties, the international order and international institutions are now being questioned.

It’s important that companies continue to work at a local level because there is an intersection between sustainability and security.

If we are a responsible citizen in a community, we will get a better licence to operate. That gives us better relations with our local stakeholders, whether that’s local government, the local supply chain or the communities around our hotel. Working at a local level allows us to see that intersection between sustainability and security at work.

How things will play out internationally, and how balances will be restored, is a much bigger question. From a risk-management perspective, armed conflict and the impact of climate change are at the top of the agenda, as shown in the yearly World Economic Forum risk rating and risk barometer.

We need to be mindful of the impact these changes can have on businesses: on supply chains, on where we develop and on making our properties more resilient.

We also need very good processes in case something happens. We always think about people first, no matter what, followed by property and reputation.

We need a good management system, which we have in our company, to handle any incident or crisis that may happen.