Coline Pont: Making Sustainability Work Across a Global Hotel Network

Corporate sustainability commitments have to work in practice, and for a hospitality group, that happens in hotels. This is where energy and water are managed every day, sustainable food is sourced and served at scale, and thousands of purchasing and operating decisions are made across individual properties.

 

Much of that work also depends on people outside the sustainability team. Hotel owners play a central role in investment decisions. Operators have to make new approaches work day to day. Suppliers influence a large part of the wider footprint, while guests and corporate customers increasingly expect clearer evidence of what hotels are doing.

 

In 2026, Accor set out the next phase of its sustainability approach through Hosting Change, its roadmap to 2030. Alongside carbon and resource use, the strategy covers hotel design and operations, employees, the guest experience, food, suppliers, communities and the natural environments in which hotels operate.

 

The challenge now is how those priorities translate into decisions at hotel level across a network spanning thousands of properties and very different markets.

 

In this edition of the OneStop ESG Thought Leadership Series, Coline Pont, Chief Sustainability Officer at Accor, discusses what makes sustainability work inside a global hospitality business, how Accor is working with owners and partners, and what needs to change across the industry over the next few years.

 

1. Sustainability in hospitality is increasingly being linked to the performance and resilience of hotels. Where do you see the strongest business case today, and what has changed in that conversation over the past few years?

 

Coline Pont: We have entered a very different period. Extreme weather, energy price swings, and changing regulations now directly touch our daily operations. The energy crisis that began in 2022 made this clear very quickly. Utilities usually represent 5% to 8% of a hotel’s revenue, making them our second largest variable cost after labor. When energy prices surged in 2022, utility bills jumped sharply in many markets. But energy is only part of the story. Water stress and extreme heat are becoming routine operational realities. In regions like Southern Europe, summer droughts bring local water restrictions, while prolonged heatwaves force cooling systems to run continuously.

 

In a hotel running 24 hours a day, saving energy and water directly protects hotel margins and reduces financial uncertainty for owners.

 

Expectations have also changed outside the company. Travelers think more about the impact of their choices, and over the past five years sustainability has become a much bigger part of how many people plan a trip.

 

Together, these changes mark a deeper shift. For many years, our industry discussed sustainability mainly through compliance and reporting. Today it is part of how we set our strategy, run our hotels and look at financial performance.

 

In hospitality, that means using less energy and water for the same quality of stay, building and renovating hotels so they cope better with heat and shortages, and offering the kind of stay guests now look for.

 

I see this as a source of resilience and value for owners and for the Group, much more than a constraint. This year's energy shock has made that easier for everyone to see.

 

2. You have worked across procurement, sustainability and business transformation during your career. How has that experience shaped Accor’s new sustainability roadmap, Hosting Change, particularly when it comes to making sustainability work in practice across a large and complex organisation?

 

Coline Pont: Working in procurement and business transformation showed me that large organizations need two things to move fast: clarity on the non-negotiables, and freedom to innovate. You cannot mandate local enthusiasm from headquarters, but you can build the framework that allows local initiatives to grow.

 

That is how we designed Hosting Change, the roadmap we launched in April 2026. It works as an umbrella. The Group sets a common baseline for every hotel on energy, carbon, water, waste, people and supply chains, and we follow it closely: sustainability objectives are part of Group bonuses, and our Executive Committee reviews our extra-financial performance every month.

 

Above that baseline, our brands play a very strong role. Each brand knows its guests and the places where its hotels operate, so each one decides where to set a higher standard that fits its identity.

 

ibis is a good example. One of our Group commitments is to open employment pathways for people who face the biggest barriers to work. ibis turned it into its own programme, ibis unlocked, built with the Inspired by Kylian Mbappe Foundation: short training modules on WhatsApp, then mentoring and, possibly, a job in one of our hotels.

 

Novotel, our founding brand, chose the ocean. Its three-year partnership with WWF France covers more than 600 hotels, with a strong focus on training chefs on seafood and removing vulnerable species from menus. What Novotel learned is helping shape new seafood rules for all Accor brands.

 

New ideas can also come from outside. Through our Sustainability Innovation Program, we look for solutions with start-ups and partners, test them in hotels and scale the ones that work across the network. This year the focus is water.

 

This is the balance I look for: a clear direction from the Group, and room for each brand to go further in its own way. And whenever we bring care and joy into the doing, the results follow.

 

3. Procurement is one area where sustainability ambitions have to translate into very practical decisions. What role can purchasing and supplier relationships play in accelerating progress, and what have you learned about embedding sustainability into procurement at scale?

 

Coline Pont: Purchasing is our single largest lever for accelerating change, simply because roughly 60% of our environmental footprint is embedded in our supply chain. You cannot hit ambitious climate targets through hotel operations alone; you have to move upstream.

 

That is where supplier relationships make the difference. Working with more than 4,500 suppliers, our role is not just to police compliance. Our Responsible Procurement Charter sets non-negotiable baselines, but real acceleration comes from active partnership.

 

Through our decarbonization program, we provide suppliers with practical tools and training to help them measure and reduce their own emissions. In less than a year, 1,000 suppliers representing 75% of our purchasing volume joined the initiative, which received an industry award in 2025 from the World Sustainable Travel and Hospitality Alliance.

 

In practice, procurement also shapes what hotels can actually achieve on the ground. By working closely with suppliers to develop viable alternatives, we phased out more than 50 single-use plastic items across nearly 90% of hotels in the network. To reach every property effectively, we work directly with our brands so that sustainable purchasing becomes embedded into their operational standards.

 

Lasting adoption happens when we help suppliers improve upstream, and provide solutions that work in daily hotel operations.

 

4. Accor recently launched its Sustainability Owners Advisory Board to bring owners more directly into the sustainability conversation. In an asset-light model, how do you make sustainability compelling for hotels owners?

 

Coline Pont: In each hotel, we work as a partner to the owner, from the first design choices to the way the hotel runs every day. Hosting Change must make sense for owners, so we built it with them, through months of conversations with owners, brands and hotel teams. Our new Sustainability Owners Advisory Board, which brings together owners representing around half of our network, now carries that work forward.

 

Listening is only the start. The change we need is systemic, and much of it has never been done before, so we must invent new ways to make it happen. That is the spirit of the four extra miles in Hosting Change: areas such as plant-forward food or employment pathways for people far from work, where we want to go beyond the usual standard and try things our industry has not done yet.

 

Our Water Challenge last year showed what a targeted and gamified approach can do. We asked every hotel to cut its water use and turned it into a competition between hotels. Teams competed and shared ideas, and one hotel in Brazil cut its water intensity by 66%. When change is new, appealing and joyful, teams go further than the target.

 

5. Accor’s 2026 Water Policy puts greater emphasis on science-based action and recognising that water pressures vary significantly between destinations. How do you decide where intervention is most urgent, and what does effective water management look like for a hotel operating in a highly water-stressed location?

 

Coline Pont: Water risk is always local. A hotel that uses water without difficulty in one city could face real shortages a few hundred kilometres away. So we start with science: we regularly assess water stress for every location in our network, looking at how much water is available, its quality and the pressure hotel operations add. Our latest assessment identified 2,284 priority hotels and five river basins where action matters most.

 

That assessment tells us where the risk is. Investors now check water risk before they invest in a hotel, and during the 2024 drought in Catalonia, hotels in some towns were limited to 100 litres per guest per day. Where these pressures meet, we act first.

 

In a highly water-stressed location, good water management changes both the building and the way the hotel runs. Mövenpick Petra, in Jordan, replaced the bathtubs in 90% of its rooms with walk-in showers. Several Novotel hotels in China treat the water from showers and sinks on site and reuse it for irrigation, toilet flushing and cooling.

 

We also want to be pioneers, so we watch closely what others are doing, in hospitality and beyond, and we work with Water Unite to find new efficiency and reuse solutions we can test in hotels. Across the network, water intensity fell by 5.2% in 2025, and the World Economic Forum recently selected our Global Water Action initiative as one of its first six Beyond Tourism Impact Stars.

 

6. Reducing emissions across thousands of hotels is very different from setting a group-level climate target. Where is hotel decarbonisation proving hardest in practice, and which changes do you think can make the biggest difference over the next few years?

 

Coline Pont: Across our network of over 5,800 hotels, decarbonization starts with foundational actions like LED lighting, high-efficiency boilers, and smart room controls. Today, 57% of our portfolio is eco-certified, meaning more than half our hotels already have a structured operational baseline in place. Our priority is identifying where each hotel stands and unlocking the next wave of energy-saving opportunities, because showing immediate utility savings makes future investments much easier for owners to discuss.

 

An owner’s investment horizon is a central factor. Owners holding an asset long-term can commit to deep retrofits, such as modernizing heating and cooling systems. When an owner’s horizon is shorter, payback speed is critical. Research shows that higher energy prices have compressed payback periods for major building efficiency upgrades down to 3 to 5 years, making a compelling financial case even for shorter holding periods.

 

One example is CLEAR PATH, a solution we developed with JLL in China to help owners evaluate investment decisions. A hotel inputs a year of energy and water data, building age, operating hours, and occupancy. The tool compares the asset against similar hotels, calculates expected energy savings and payback times for specific interventions, and ranks them by return on investment. 120 hotels have already received their tailored reports, and we are expanding the tool into other regions.

 

Over the next few years, energy efficiency will make the single biggest impact. Energy accounts for roughly 80% of the emissions in our science-based scope, while remaining our largest variable expense after payroll. Using less energy and optimizing how buildings run are the changes that matter most. The rest of our footprint lies in our supply chain, which is why working directly with our suppliers is our other major priority.

 

7. Accor says 57% of its hotels were eco-certified by the end of 2025, with a target of 75% by 2030. As certification becomes more widespread across hospitality, what role should it ultimately play for owners, corporate customers and travellers, and how can the industry ensure that certification continues to reflect meaningful performance rather than simply becoming another label?

 

Coline Pont: We had our own internal sustainability standards long before third-party certification became common, starting back in 1998 with an Environment Charter of 65 actions. We moved to external, independent certification well ahead of European regulations.

 

We made that choice because ESG performance must be verified. Independent certification is demanding for hotels: trusted standards like Green Key and Green Globe require independent, on-site audits rather than self-declarations. Furthermore, their criteria are constantly tightening to raise the bar, and certifications must be renewed every one to two years, keeping the label firmly tied to real, ongoing progress. By the end of 2025, 57% of our hotels were eco-certified, and we are on track for 75% by 2030.

 

For hotel owners, certification is becoming a commercial tool. Corporate clients increasingly mandate it: in a test with Booking.com, the share of bookings going to certified hotels jumped from 15% to 27% when the certification badge was displayed. With leisure travellers, we are finally seeing the first signals.

 

Accor has recently set out new commitments around food, including reducing waste and increasing plant-forward options. What have you learned about making those changes work for chefs, hotel operators and guests, alongside the environmental benefits?

 

Food is an area where we can really bring the "going the extra mile" approach behind Hosting Change to life. Accor is known first as a hotel company, but our network also includes more than 10,000 restaurants and bars, and our chefs and F&B teams care deeply about creating healthy, high-quality and memorable experiences for guests.

 

We all have a special, almost intimate relationship with food, so any change in what people eat has to come from desire. This is true in our hotel restaurants, and in our catering businesses. Our goal of 35% plant-forward dishes by 2030 keeps meat on the menu and relies on the creativity of our chefs, so guests choose these dishes because they want them. We also make the better choice a rewarding one. This September, with "Oh My Green", guests of participating Novotel hotels earned 100 ALL loyalty points when they ordered a plant-forward dish.

 

Food waste follows the same logic. More than 3,000 hotels now weigh what they throw away, and kitchen teams use what they see to adjust buffets and menus. Between 2023 and 2025, we cut food waste by 45%, which also shows in the food cost.

 

8. Looking towards 2030, what do you think the hospitality industry needs to do differently if sustainability is to become part of how hotels are actually run, rather than something that sits alongside the business?

 

Coline Pont: Our industry has already moved past that point. As I said earlier, sustainability is part of how we set our strategy, operate hotels and look at financial performance. What we need by 2030 is to go further and faster, and I see three conditions for that.

 

The first is working together as an industry. That is why we support the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance's Net Positive Hospitality Global Summit, among other initiatives. As we head into 2027, the UN International Year of Sustainable and Resilient Tourism, the summit is inviting start-ups and innovators to bring solutions that hotels can put in place today.

 

The second is regulation. Today, rules are tightening in some regions and rolling back in others. A clearer and more consistent regulatory framework would give every hotel the same starting line and reward those who invest. It would also help create clearer standards for measuring progress, making it easier to distinguish tangible action from commitments alone.

 

The third is making sustainable choices seamless for guests. The interest is clear, with around 80% of global travelers consistently stating that sustainability matters to them. However, when people book a hotel, they are looking for comfort, convenience, and quality. They do not want added friction or complicated choices. Our responsibility is to integrate energy efficiency, local sourcing, and waste reduction so naturally into the stay that choosing a sustainable hotel becomes the obvious, effortless decision.