Supply chain rating agency EcoVadis and the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance have announced a strategic partnership aimed at accelerating sustainable procurement and decarbonisation across the global hospitality sector.
The collaboration bridges the Alliance’s expansive network — which represents over 66,000 hotels and eight million rooms globally — with EcoVadis’s sustainability assessment framework. By appointing EcoVadis as its preferred sustainable procurement partner, the Alliance intends to supply its members with a scalable, verified blueprint to improve supply chain transparency and manage escalating enterprise risk.
The joint strategy targets critical areas of fragmentation within the hospitality industry through three core operational pillars:
- Supplier performance tracking: The initiative will leverage the Alliance’s network to scale up EcoVadis supplier assessments. This integration provides procurement teams with immediate visibility into third-party risks whilst equipping suppliers with standardised, actionable improvement pathways.
- Standardised decarbonisation: By utilising the EcoVadis Carbon Action Manager, the partnership aims to eliminate data redundancy and generate assurance-ready Scope 3 emissions insights, assisting hotel groups in meeting mandatory climate disclosure regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
- Unified ethical standards: The entities will merge the Alliance’s existing welfare frameworks with EcoVadis’s Human Rights solutions to create a unified system targeting fair labor practices and ethical recruitment across supply networks.
The partnership also acts as a strategic accelerator for the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement (HARP) initiative. Launched by EcoVadis in 2023 alongside premier global hospitality brands, HARP will remain an autonomous, antitrust-compliant network. While the Alliance will hold no operational or governance role in HARP, it will use its significant industry convening power to endorse its methodologies, establishing a clear standard for procurement excellence.
Annette Gevaert, Senior Vice President of Alliances and Strategic Initiatives at EcoVadis, noted that combining their technical assessment capabilities with the Alliance’s industry reach makes it simpler for hotel groups to secure actionable intelligence. She added that the framework streamlines requirements for suppliers, effectively reducing duplicated corporate data requests.
Glenn Mandziuk, President and Chief Executive of the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, emphasised that sustainability has transitioned into the bedrock of future-proofing the hospitality industry. He stated that the formalised partnership moves the sector away from siloed efforts toward a unified standard, offering a scalable, data-backed blueprint for mitigating supply chain risk.
