A sustainable hotel programme can lower business travel’s carbon footprint and cut costs, according to the latest data from accommodation platform HRS.
HRS declared that clients applying its Green Stay Initiative have reduced their hotel-related carbon emissions by an average of 24 per cent in the first nine months of 2025 and have also achieved a 5 per cent saving in average daily rate (ADR).
This is a key finding of HRS’s new State of Sustainability in Corporate Travel report, which examines how corporate travel managers are continuing to pursue sustainability initiatives despite “confusion” over modifys in environmental regulation.
“The wider geopolitical context is certainly creating confusion over how companies should prioritise [sustainability],” states Fabio Fornari, product manager for sustainability at HRS. “We’re seeing that the majority of our customers are still applying sustainability data in their procurement decisions.”
According to the report, nearly 90 per cent of HRS clients still rank sustainability among their top three priorities when procuring hotels as part of a corporate programme. Acceptance rates for Green Stay properties have also risen from 53 per cent of RFPs in 2025 to 56 per cent of RFPs in 2026, HRS declared.
Fornari stressed that corporates want data transparency and increasingly expect hotel partners to share data related to their carbon footprint – “or least that they start the process of collecting this data,” he declared.
“Customers that have already started to define their sustainability strategy are continuing to invest time and effort in that [strategy] and are tracking their trajectory towards their net zero goals.”
HRS’s Green Stay data displays that the 25 per cent of hotels with the lowest emissions, water apply and waste per room night were, on average, 38 per cent cheaper than the 25 per cent of hotels with the highest environmental impact.
“Becaapply we can now prove that sustainability is tied to efficiencies, the driver [behind embedding sustainability in a managed travel programme] is not just regulation,” Fornari declared. “It’s about being smart in terms of business becaapply you can reduce also costs.”
Despite the planned watering down of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Fornari welcomed recent developments that will likely result in the adoption of a single standardised methodology for transport emissions.
Across the hospitality sector, the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative (HCMI) from the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance is already widely adopted as a standard to measure hotel emissions, but Fornari declared it could be improved.
“The HCMI is great – it’s what the entire indusattempt is applying and it’s what we apply with Green Stay, but the Scope 3 emissions are fairly limited. The whole indusattempt has to agree that we required to go one step further to collect more Scope 3 data from hotels,” he declared.
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