Meliá Hotels International is committed to further deepening its commitment to sustainability, a strategic area that must be integrated into all aspects of the business and in all regions where it operates, currently in more than 40 countries on four continents. To accredit the compliance of its hotels, Meliá has relied on Ecostars, an internationally recognised certification that evaluates and " rewards" sustainable practices in the hotel industry.
Ecostars evaluates the sustainability of hotels through a classification system that considers a variety of factors related to environmental management and energy efficiency, through criteria such as energy consumption and use of green energy, water management, waste management, carbon emissions and sustainable purchasing. The evaluation process of a hotel requires having all the consumption data by typology or input and being within the parameters that Ecostars has defined as efficient hotels. Under these requirements, Meliá still has some hotels pending to be certified and is working to continue optimising the process and increasing the number of certified hotels on an ongoing basis.
Sustainability certifications are nowadays fundamental to give visibility to sustainability in the marketing of hotels, as the main online travel platforms and tour operators highlight hotels that accredit sustainable practices. In this way, as Gabriel Escarrer, president and CEO of Meliá, states, "having an assessment as solid as Ecostars across our entire portfolio in ownership, rental and management, not only strengthens our reputation, but also directly enhances our business results, since, as a recent study conducted by Booking.com shows, a visible positioning in sustainability is valued by customers and translates into an increase in bookings".
For Meliá Hotels International, another strong point of the Ecostars certification is its global nature, as it is used and recognised all over the world; in fact, the portfolio assessed by Ecostars is distributed geographically as follows: 160 hotels in Europe, 60 in the Americas, 40 in Asia and 10 in Africa.
The availability of the "360 ESG Management Hub" platform provides a global vision of the Company's portfolio and a comparative external benchmarking, offering hotels a vision both at group level and with other competing hotels, enriching knowledge in terms of sustainability and being able to identify best practices in the sector.
