ESG is now shaping cost, risk and resilience across hospitality & tourism.

For years, sustainability was often treated as a separate programme: reduce energy, cut waste, publish a policy and report progress.

That is changing.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is increasingly being used across hospitality and tourism as a way to understand how a business performs across areas that affect cost, risk, people, operations and long-term resilience.

For tourism and hospitality businesses, that means ESG is becoming less about producing another sustainability document and more about answering practical business questions. Where are we using too much energy? Are we managing supply-chain risks? Can we evidence our environmental claims? Are our people supported? Do we have reliable data to show whether things are improving?

And in 2026, there are clear signs that the industry is moving in that direction.

Tourism is developing its own ESG framework

One of the clearest signals comes from UN Tourism.

Working with the University of Oxford SDG Impact Lab and tourism businesses around the world, UN Tourism is developing a global ESG Framework specifically for tourism. Its research involved nearly 600 tourism companies and found that businesses are struggling with a fragmented landscape of standards, reporting requirements and different ways of measuring sustainability.

A first draft of the framework was developed in spring 2026. Its purpose is to identify the ESG issues that matter most to tourism and establish clearer, more consistent ways to measure them.

That matters because tourism businesses have some very particular impacts and risks. Energy, water, waste and carbon sit alongside workforce wellbeing, local communities, procurement, customer safety, governance and business resilience.

UN Tourism identifies several direct business reasons for taking ESG seriously, including customer acquisition and retention, managing regulation and risk, access to sustainable finance and investor relations.

In other words, this is no longer simply an environmental agenda.

Better data is becoming part of good management

Measurement is another big shift.

The 2026 Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index now draws on data from approximately 31,000 hotels worldwide, benchmarking carbon, energy, water and waste performance.

That is hotel-specific evidence, but the principle applies much more widely across tourism: knowing your own figures is useful; understanding what they mean and how performance changes over time is better.

For an individual tourism or hospitality business, good ESG data can answer much more useful questions.

Are energy costs rising because of tariffs or because the building is becoming less efficient? Is water consumption improving relative to visitor numbers or occupancy? Which sites in a group are performing well, and which need attention? Are changes to equipment or operating practices actually delivering the savings expected?

The point is not to collect data for its own sake. It is to use it to make better decisions.

Whitbread offers a useful hospitality example. In 2025/26 it developed site-level data covering carbon, water and waste intensity across its hotel estate. The company says the data now supports corporate RFPs and booking-platform integration as well as its own sustainability work.

That is ESG operating as business information, not a separate sustainability exercise.

Environmental action can have an operational return

The environmental part of ESG is often where some of the most immediate business benefits appear.

Energy, water and waste all carry a cost. Reducing them can therefore improve environmental performance and operating efficiency at the same time.

Whitbread reports an 18% reduction in water use per Premier Inn guest in the UK and Ireland against its 2019/20 baseline, alongside significant reductions in Scope 1 and 2 emissions intensity.

Essendi, one of Europe’s large hotel owner-operators, reported a 20% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions between 2019 and 2025. Importantly, the first phase of its programme concentrated heavily on no- and low-capital-cost measures: training teams, improving everyday operations, carrying out technical audits and improving the quality of environmental data.

That is an important point for smaller tourism businesses too. ESG does not automatically mean major capital expenditure.

Sometimes the gains begin with understanding what is happening already: controls that are set incorrectly, equipment running when it does not need to, avoidable waste, poor purchasing decisions or simply a lack of reliable information.

Investment can bring larger returns too. At a 2026 hospitality investment conference, LaSalle Investment Management reported a 30% energy saving following improvements to the façade and heating system at a Barcelona hotel.

Individual examples should not be treated as guaranteed returns for every tourism business, but they demonstrate the commercial link between resource efficiency and operating performance.

ESG is moving into commercial decisions

Perhaps the most interesting shift is that ESG information is increasingly being used outside sustainability teams.

It is appearing in procurement, corporate travel, investment decisions, asset management and requests for proposals.

Whitbread describes sustainability credentials as a core sourcing requirement for a growing number of travel-management companies, corporate customers and government clients. Its site-level sustainability dataset is now being used to support RFP responses and booking-platform integration.

That matters beyond hotels. Venues, attractions, event businesses, tour operators and other tourism organisations increasingly find themselves answering questions about sustainability from corporate buyers, partners, funders and procurement teams.

The investment market is looking at the same issues from another direction.

Hotel owners and investors are increasingly incorporating sustainability into underwriting, asset management, resilience planning and refurbishment decisions. Recent industry discussion suggests the strongest financial case is often operational efficiency and avoiding the downside of poorly performing assets, rather than assuming sustainability automatically produces a “green premium”.

That distinction is useful.

The business case for ESG does not need exaggerated promises. Lower operating costs, better information, stronger RFP responses, reduced risk and more resilient businesses are tangible benefits in their own right.

ESG is much broader than carbon

The “S” and “G” can sometimes disappear behind the environmental headlines.

But for tourism and hospitality businesses, people and governance are fundamental.

The social side includes areas such as staff wellbeing, health and safety, equality, skills, local employment, community relationships and accessibility.

Governance covers the systems behind the promises: who is responsible, how performance is monitored, how claims are checked, how suppliers are managed and whether there is evidence behind what the business says.

Accor’s latest ESG reporting illustrates that breadth. Alongside environmental metrics such as water intensity and hotel certification, it reports on representation in leadership and the reach of its community programmes. At the end of 2025, 57% of its hotels were eco-certified, women represented 42% of its executive committee, and more than 17,000 people benefited from solidarity projects during the year.

Again, that is a hospitality example, but the wider point applies across tourism.

A visitor attraction, tour operator or event business may have a very different environmental footprint from a hotel, but questions around staff, communities, suppliers, accountability and evidence still matter.

That is why ESG can be useful as a framework. It stops sustainability becoming synonymous with a handful of environmental actions and asks businesses to look more broadly at how they operate.

The challenge is turning ESG into something manageable

The danger, of course, is that ESG becomes another layer of terminology, reporting and spreadsheets.

UN Tourism’s research found businesses already experiencing “reporting fatigue” as they try to navigate overlapping frameworks and standards. Smaller businesses in particular face limits on time and resources.

The answer is not to measure everything.

A practical ESG approach should help a tourism or hospitality business identify what matters most, establish a baseline and then concentrate effort where it can make a meaningful difference.

That might mean:

• Measure what matters. Start with useful indicators such as energy, water, waste, carbon, people and procurement rather than collecting data with no clear purpose.
• Connect sustainability to business decisions. Look for links with operating cost, customer requirements, risk, staff retention and purchasing.
• Give someone responsibility. Progress is much harder when sustainability belongs to everybody in theory and nobody in practice.
• Keep evidence. Reliable records make it easier to monitor improvement, answer RFPs and support credible sustainability claims.
• Review and improve. ESG should show whether actions are working and where the next priorities lie.

ESG has become part of running a better business

The direction of travel is increasingly clear.

Tourism now has a global ESG framework in development. Hotel performance is being benchmarked across tens of thousands of properties. Major hospitality businesses are bringing carbon, water, people, procurement and governance data into operational and commercial decisions.

Across the wider tourism industry, the same principles are becoming increasingly relevant: understand the impacts that matter to your business, measure enough to make informed decisions and be able to demonstrate progress with credible evidence.

That does not mean every tourism business needs a large ESG department or an elaborate reporting system.

Done well, ESG provides structure around something good businesses are already trying to do: reduce waste and cost, look after people, manage risk, respond to customers and make better long-term decisions.

That is where ESG becomes commercially useful — as a clearer, more structured way to run and improve the business.

I think this version now feels properly Green Tourism-wide, while still being scrupulous about which examples are specifically hotel/hospitality based.