For years, the global hospitality sector was mainly focused on measuring sustainability through operational metrics like emissions, water, energy and waste.

However, this is now changing. Today, hotels across the world are starting to measure their impact across a broader set of parameters, including biodiversity and environment, local communities and regional economic contributions.

This has led to the rise of impact reporting, rather than only sustainability reporting, as companies attempt to go beyond simply what ESG regulations require and towards examining whether their presence is actually leaving a lasting, positive impact on their surrounding regions.

What Hospitality Impact Looks Like On A Regional Level

Today, a hotel’s impact can extend well beyond its own environmental footprint and can influence local employment, procurement, culture and the wider economy in a number of ways.

Through its Environmental, Economic and Social Impact Report , Turkey’s Anda Barut Collection has gone beyond measuring waste management, water and energy efficiency to also focus on local communities, green purchasing and culture and art as part of its broader impact.

The majority of employees are hired locally, with the hotel also offering internship programs and young talent development projects in cooperation with universities, tourism vocational high schools and vocational training institutions.

The hotel is also attempting to include more local suppliers in its procurement strategy. In 2024, Anda Barut’s local sales volume went up to 28.2%, up from 15.4%, while its local supplier ratio increased to 24.1%, from 23.8%.

Its green purchasing standards focus on organic, sustainably sourced products containing recycled or recyclable raw materials, with less packaging and waste. Businesses run by cooperatives, local unions and women entrepreneurs are also consistently favoured when it comes to purchasing decisions.

Suppliers are periodically re-evaluated according to operational, environmental and social risk levels, with these assessments being carried out more frequently for suppliers from whom higher volume purchases are made.

The hotel also supports cultural and artistic development in the surrounding regions, through events such as the Contemporary Young Artists Meeting, an annual art event aiming to bring together talents from various creative disciplines to create new work on-site.

Anda Barut Collection is also the official main sponsor for the entire Ancient City of Side Excavation and Restoration project, which involves restoration and archaeological restoration across Side’s Roman baths, agoras, colonnaded streets and temples.

Through these practices, the hotel expands its impact on its surroundings far beyond its core sustainability practices like rain harvesting, drought-resistent landscaping and sensor-driven smart building technologies.

“Hotel brands increasingly recognise that sustainability is no longer just about responsible operations- it is about creating measurable environmental and social value, and communicating that impact with transparency and credibility,” Seda Aslan Yilmaz, Turkish tourism expert, told Forbes in an email.

She added: “This is where impact reporting becomes a strategic tool- not simply to measure performance, but to demonstrate how a hotel contributes to the long-term resilience and prosperity of its destination.”

From Reducing Footprint To Measuring Contribution

While measuring impact on a regional scale requires a localised approach, on a global scale it needs to be consistently replicable and trackable across several properties around the world.

Hilton’s Travel With Purpose report highlights how an impact-based hospitality strategy can be applied to a worldwide portfolio spanning 144 countries and more than 9,400 properties.

One of the most important steps taken in 2025 was partnering with Hyatt and Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) to create a modernized and survivor-informed anti-human trafficking training curriculum designed to help staff recognise, respond to and report instances of trafficking.

Instead of keeping this curriculum restricted to only these three groups, it has been made available to the industry free of charge.

The Hilton Global Foundation has also distributed more than 2.3 million meals globally last year to communities in need, which reached over 995,000 people. This was across local neighbourhoods, sustainable travel destinations and disaster-impacted communities worldwide.

This helped divert around 2.1 million pounds of waste from landfills, contributing to the hotel’s 64.7% reduction in landfill waste intensity for managed hotels since 2008.

Regional food surplus redistribution is also carried out with organisations like The Felix Project in London, while large-scale waste reductions are carried out through AI-tracked kitchen initiatives like Hilton’s Green Ramadan program across the Middle East and Africa.

Since 2019, over $22 million in grants have also been distributed to improve environmental resilience and food security, as well as support localised crisis relief.

This involves providing emergency shelter and support during events like the January 2025 Los Angeles, when Hilton provided 20,000 complimentary hotel nights to around 7,000 people.

Employees across the world also carried out 1.8 million volunteer hours during targeted impact weeks.

Impact Doesn’t Mean Measuring Everything

Impact reporting does not have to mean measuring everything, nor should all metrics be given the same weightage.

In many cases, it can only mean focusing on one key aspect, where a hospitality business has the opportunity to make the most long-lasting measurable contribution.

Instead of using a broader tourism impact framework, Novotel’s Ocean Impact Report focuses solely on the ocean’s environmental system.

This is built around three pillars, namely reducing impact on marine pollution and ocean acidification, healthier, more sustainable food and better ocean education and awareness.

Novotel actively funds and supports seven World Wildlife Fund ocean conservation projects globally.

This includes protecting Posidonia meadows, which act as vital carbon sinks and marine habitats, by deploying low-impact mooring buoys. Another key project is identifying and removing ghost gear like lost, abandoned or discarded fishing sets from the seabed.

The hotel also supports sea turtle tracking and conservation programs in the Western Atlantic, along with regional collaborations in places like Australia to protect migratory pathways and critical habitats for marine species.

This shift towards conservation is seen within the company as well, with around 41% of the brand’s hotels removing vulnerable seafood species from their menus. About 1,600 chefs and kitchen team members have completed the WWF Sustainable Seafood Training.

Over 3,200 hotel staff have completed ocean awareness training, developed alongside AXA Climate too.

As such, targeted impact reporting can help a hospitality company focus solely on the areas where it is most able to develop effective solutions.

“Protecting the ocean is not a distant environmental concern. It is closely tied to the future of travel, to the resilience of communities and to the quality of life we all depend on,” Jean-Yves Minet, global brand president at Novotel, said in the report.

The Challenges With Measuring Impact

While impact reporting in hospitality has seen a boost in recent years, some key challenges remain.

One of the biggest challenges is determining how to measure often qualitative metrics such as employee wellbeing or community benefit.

This is because although a hotel can implement measures such as training and development, mental health leave or volunteering days, the actual resulting impact from these can be more difficult to consistently quantify.

Several hotels may also focus only on tracking the work they do, instead of the actual results they produce. This can sometimes be due to the cost and effort involved in tracking real change.

In many cases, that leads to the methodology and boundaries of the reporting often being left unexplained too.

Another issue is measuring how much of an outcome can be attributed to a hotel and how much to wider factors.

For example, it can be challenging to differentiate between the change created by a hotel supporting local employment and the effects of the wider tourism economy’s growth.

A lack of clear and universally standardised frameworks around impact reporting also means that data remains inconsistent and hard to compare across sectors. In many cases, metrics and actions reported by some hotels may not have been independently validated and verified either.

What Better Impact Reporting Could Look Like

One of the key things better impact reporting could aim to do is combining quantitative indicators with clearly-defined qualitative measures. This could make hard-to-quantify qualitative outcomes easier to understand.

Hospitality companies could also focus on clearly explaining what is included in their reporting, which could include the property itself, supply chains, the destination or even the wider portfolio. At the same time, it should be clear what lies outside of this scope too.

Similarly, transparent methodology needs to be used, to help investors and consumers understand exactly how figures such as economic contribution or biodiversity impact were calculated.

To the extent possible, hotels should try to distinguish between outcomes it caused directly through its measures, and those to which it only contributed as part of a wider ecosystem.

Key metrics and measures should be independently assured and verified, rather than simply presented as corporate claims too.

Similarly, greater standardisation of impact metrics, methodology and frameworks could help these reports be used in shaping long-term sustainable hospitality strategy.

The Next Era Of Hospitality Impact Reporting

For decades, hospitality has become increasingly proficient at measuring what hotels consume and emit.

However, the next phase in sustainability reporting in hospitality is measuring how hotels affect, contribute to and change the surroundings and communities they operate in.

This impact can be reported in several different forms, from destination-level to ecosystem-level and even on a global community and environmental scale.

However, the hospitality groups best positioned for success will not be the ones which attempt to measure everything indiscriminately, but rather the ones which focus on only the metrics where they can credibly show meaningful impact.