Vision: A prosperous and responsible hospitality sector that gives back to the destination more than it takes
Net Positive strategies aim to put more back into society, the environment, and the global economy than they take out. By working together as an industry, we have the collective power to ensure that our destinations and communities are protected and regenerated now and for future generations. Hear from leading industry CEOs on how we are making Net Positive Hospitality a reality.
Respecting and enriching the lives of all our people
Replenishing resources and restoring biodiversity for a thriving natural world
Working in harmony with our communities and ecosystems
Ensuring economic successes and opportunities benefit all
Everyone will leave a footprint.
Net Positive is about understanding the relationship between our negative impacts – our footprints – and our positive contributions – our handprints – to ensure we are treading as lightly as possible and have a lasting positive effect. This way, we all contribute towards ensuring that our communities and destinations are thriving and healthy.
To achieve our vision of a prosperous and responsible hospitality sector that gives back to the destination more than it takes, we have created the Pathway to Net Positive Hospitality.
To be truly Net Positive we must be taking action across people, planet, place and prosperity. Each stage encompasses core topics of:
An overview of the Pathway to Net Positive Hospitality, including guidance on understanding your impact, prioritising action and getting started with the four stages.
An outline of the core topics across environmental, social and governance, exploring the key actions for hotels for each stage.
The Pathway Tool has been developed to help hotels measure their progress on the journey to a Net Positive future. It can be applied in four steps depending on data quality and availability. By following the four step process, hotels can first gain a general understanding of their progress and identify data gaps, then going on to consider regional relevance, run the assessment locally to account for regionality and, finally, aggregate the collected data to the corporate level.
The Net Positive Simulation has been developed to engage and upskill hospitality leaders and students, bringing Net Positive Hospitality to life and demonstrating how you can implement the Pathway. It helps users to understand the impacts of their decisions, test sustainability actions and create a tailored sustainability action plan.
The Pathway has been created with insights from Members and Affiliate Members of the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance in consultation with sustainability and industry experts.
It aligns with the major industry standards, ratings and frameworks to lead towards the harmonisation of global metrics, including:
The World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance would like to thank all those who offered their advice and expertise during the development of the Pathway.
Thanks to our member companies, Board and Councils who provided critical feedback to ensure this would be most relevant and useful to the industry.
We are grateful to several other organisations and experts for their input, support and peer review: