American Express Meetings & Events and Maxvantage are helping clients with their green meeting objectives with The Carbon Accounting Company’s Green Hotels Global (GHG). American Express Meetings & Events is providing its support to increase hotel participation on behalf of their clients and Maxvantage in GHG’s environmental reporting program.
Launched last year, Green Hotels Global initially partnered with hotels to determine and disclose metrics on environmental impact performance to industry stakeholders. Now expanding the program, GHG is working to provide companies with access to environmental data for their meetings programs. The metrics are valuable in both the meeting planning and post-meeting evaluation stages.
“Data is essential to having a successful meetings program and by supporting hotels’ participation in GHG, we are helping our clients have the tools to grasp the environmental footprint of each hotel and event,” said Issa Jouaneh, vice president and general manager for American Express Meetings & Events. “With this data, companies can be better equipped to accomplish meeting objectives that have a maximum return on investment and experience with minimum waste.”
American Express Meetings & Events is supporting GHG’s efforts to further expand and develop the program’s hotel participation by enabling 100 additional hotels to participate in the initiative.
“Johnson Controls is very serious about reducing its environmental footprint. Sustainability is one of top five business goals for our organization,” said Karen Lynch, CMP, Global Lead Meetings & Events, Johnson Controls Inc. “We were looking for a way to pioneer in the travel & meetings space and Green Hotels Global gives us real metrics for carbon, water and waste for each individual property. No estimates or guesstimates. Green Hotels Global helps hotels measure and reduce the metrics that make a real difference to the environment.”
Participating hotels allow American Express Meeting & Events and Maxvantage clients to compare standardized footprints of carbon and water use as well as waste diversions across all properties generally and per meeting. Clients can access property specific metrics for comparisons during the RFP process which is available through industry-wide meeting booking solutions and also through a Green Hotels Global portal. Additionally, once the event has been completed, reports can be generated calculating the hotels’ component of a meeting’s environmental impact.
“American Express Meetings & Events recognized that clients were embarking on large-scale green initiatives and that having this data available for meetings and events is necessary to help them reach their goals,” said Justin Raymond, president and chief executive officer, The Carbon Accounting Company. “We are excited that our tool brings hotels and corporations an opportunity to get a head start on gathering metrics that are expected to be in next year’s standard GBTA hotel RFP and in the new International Tourism Partnership and World Travel & Tourism Council’s hotel carbon measurement methodology, as well as help hotels meet the forthcoming Green Meetings Standards.”
American Express Global Business Travel was one of the first TMCs to offer these metrics to its clients starting last year. American Express Meetings & Events, Maxvantage and Green Hotels Global are currently working on developing case studies with clients to help showcase the value that standardized environmental reporting metrics bring to SMM programs.
