Growing Stronger: How New Priorities Mean Greener Business Travel
Your Space is proud to have recently received a Silver Badge in partnership with Green Tourism. This award recognises our efforts to offer guests an environmentally friendly and greener sustainable stay when they choose our serviced apartments.
As we celebrate this milestone, today’s blog explores how a greener business travel sector is meeting the needs of future-focussed organisations through collaboration and innovation. Additionally, read on to discover the next steps Your Space is taking on our personal green journey.
Greener Business Travel: A Journey to the Future
Travel holds many benefits for organisations. Notably, allowing employees to connect face-to-face, fostering greater cohesion. However, business travel also has the potential to make a sizable contribution to a company’s carbon footprint. In recent years, public awareness has grown about the detrimental effect some human activities have on the planet. Therefore, businesses are increasingly seeking to demonstrate commitment to a greener tomorrow (e.g. aiming to reduce waste and lower emissions). As well as helping secure a better future, making eco-friendly choices also appeals to investors and customers. So, actions such as optimising their ESG profile or attaining B Corp status, can give an organisation a competitive edge. Business travel represents a key area in which companies aim to become more eco-friendly in order to meet their goals.
At their Partner Engagement Days (2023 and 2024), corporate accommodation experts Silverdoor highlighted sustainability as a growing priority for the businesses they work with. Consequently, to meet corporate guests’ needs, accommodation providers should aim to facilitate greener business travel through the choices they make. For example, when preparing and maintaining their properties and providing services to guests during a stay (e.g. laundry). Moreover, alongside information about other aspects of a stay – such as cost and facilities – providers should ensure data on environmental impact is clear, accurate and accessible to bookers.
Team Green: Sharing Values, Creating Change
The responsibility for protecting our planet is undoubtedly a shared one. At Your Space, we want to help companies enjoy the creative and relational benefits of business travel in a way that conserves our natural world. As we make progress on our own green journey, we’ve found collaboration is vital. If organisations seeking a sustainable future can communicate and join forces, it becomes easier for everyone to make eco-friendly choices.
For example, at Your Space, our relationship with Green Tourism has helped us to assess and improve our environmental impact. With their advice, we have taken many steps to offer guests a more planet-conscious stay. We are also proud to work with other companies who share our commitment to greener practices. These include Swiss, who provide our laundry services, and Diversey, who supply our cleaning products (see sustainability information on websites).
Transparency and Clarity for Greener Business Travel
Your Space is also grateful to be in partnership with Silverdoor. We are currently in the process of using their innovative Carbon Calculator (launched 2023). This tool will soon offer potential guests easy access to data on the carbon footprint of a stay with us. The Carbon Calculator is the first tool of its kind within the serviced apartment sector. Accommodation operators pass on information related to 18 datapoints. Then, Silverdoor collates these figures to provide an accessible, calculated estimate of the carbon emissions produced per night of stay. As a result, companies seeking to facilitate greener business travel can easily compare the environmental impact of different apartment options.
Using the Carbon Calculator represents an exciting next chapter in Your Space’s green story. By providing this transparent, clear data related to sustainability we are serving the expressed needs of today’s business travellers. At present, our team is working to gather comprehensive information on many aspects of a stay in our apartments. These include purchased electricity and water consumption. Moreover, we have worked with Swiss to obtain energy usage figures for our outsourced laundry. We look forward to sharing our Carbon Calculator results with potential guests via Silverdoor. By doing so, we can help empower organisations to monitor their environmental impact and choose greener business travel options.
Difficult consequences face our planet should we fail to safeguard its future, but we have many reasons to be positive. Companies across the globe still take advantage of the in-person collaboration and idea generation that business travel offers. However, modern organisations are increasingly developing cleaner, greener business travel practices. Meanwhile, influenced by these new priorities, the corporate accommodation sector is forming principle-based partnerships and using new technology to improve its own sustainability. Plus, accommodation providers are working to display clear environmental impact data. At Your Space, we want help protect our world as well as providing accommodation which responds to traveller’s changing concerns. So, while celebrating our Silver Badge, we hope to progress further: becoming a greener choice for all our valued guests.
