National, October 6, 2023: Marriott International, EcoVadis, and several leading global hospitality organizations – Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Radisson Hotel Group, and two global hospitality group purchasing organizations, Avendra and Entegra – announced the launch of the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement (HARP).
Driven by members’ commitment to improving sustainability performance, the Alliance will work to accelerate sustainable practices by fostering close collaboration with trading partners to build transparency and scale positive impact across their value chains.
“As companies seek to engage their value chain partners in their sustainability efforts, they realize the complex scope, as well as common challenges, in their own sector,” said Richard Eyram, Chief Customer Officer at EcoVadis. “It is through partnerships and industry-wide collaboration that the hospitality industry can maximize its collective impact. By joining forces, aligning focus, and sharing best practices, HARP members can achieve positive outcomes that pave the way towards Net Zero targets and a more sustainable future for all.”
Bringing a common voice, standard, and platform around sustainability for the industry value chain, the HARP initiative addresses core challenges faced by its collective supplier sustainability programs including:
- Scaling up visibility by strengthening supplier engagement rate, starting with the supplier assessment.
- Accelerating suppliers’ performance improvement curve.
- Enhancing the relevance of those engagements with a focus on the industry’s key categories.
To achieve all of these goals, HARP has chosen to utilize EcoVadis’ proven sustainability rating methodology, scorecards, and improvement platform. The EcoVadis Sector Initiative features are built as an antitrust-compliant network and allow for more efficient supplier onboarding, transparency, as well as collaboration, and analytics. Together, these capabilities deliver HARP visibility across the hospitality supply chain’s sustainability performance and allow HARP members to align on the top priorities of their industry. This results in a positive message to the supplier community and a more coherent direction to enable targeted improvement.
To realize this targeted improvement and meet the requirements of the hospitality industry, HARP member suppliers will have access to additional capacity-building and engagement activities, as well as tools and best practices.
Marriott and the seven HARP founding members collectively rated more than 2,000 suppliers upon the initiative’s founding. HARP plans to further expand this number to gain greater insight into the sustainability performance of its supply chain and drive maximum improvement.