Corporate guests are pushing hotels to become more environmentally friendly. During a visit to the UAE this month, Brigitta Witt, the vice president of corporate responsibility for Hyatt, discussed what her hotel company is doing on this front and the changing expectations from customers.

Why do hotel companies seem to be increasingly talking about corporate social responsibility?

I think it's a number of things. I think first we recognise that hotels have an impact - an impact that's both positive and negative in communities, and on the environment. Hotels use a lot of resources: energy and water. And we certainly recognise that we have a real responsibility to minimise that. It also makes good business sense. Any time you use less resources, you're saving money. Any time you generate less waste, you're reducing costs. So I think it's a real win-win.

Are guests demanding that the hotels that they use be environmentally friendly?

I would say 100 per cent of our large corporate clients - especially in the US - expect us explicitly to tell them what our environmental policy is. They're even starting to ask what the carbon emissions are for every single one of our hotels. They're going into a great level of detail. I don't know that [individual] people are making purchasing decisions based on … "Is this hotel more environmentally friendly than the next?" But, I think there's an expectation there that the hotel company or hotel is simply doing the right thing.

What is Hyatt doing in terms of corporate social responsibility?

We launched Hyatt Thrive last year, which is our corporate responsibility platform, and since then we've started to implement a number of fairly substantial initiatives - everything from supplier codes of conduct, philanthropy programmes, employee training programmes.

What are some of the initiatives at your hotels in the UAE?

In Dubai, for example, I think the fact that this is a part of the world that is so water-stressed, they're doing tremendous things to reduce their water consumption. For example, they use a reverse osmosis process at all three of our properties there, which at the Grand Hyatt saves 100,000 gallons of water a day. What they do is they take grey water - it's highly treated - and then it gets put back into the air-conditioning systems and it's reused. They also capture condensate from air-conditioning systems.

What are your targets as a company through these kinds of initiatives?

I can share with you our environmental priorities, which are reducing energy, water, waste and carbon emissions. We have set goals for 2015 to reduce our energy, our carbon emissions and our waste by 25 per cent, as a company, and to reduce our water consumption by 20 per cent. We have 85,000 employees around the world and we really think that one of our biggest opportunities to have a lasting impact is to make sure that our employees … understand the issues.

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