The end of 2024 saw the first-ever joint session of Tourism Ministers in Azerbaijan, where The World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance launched its groundbreaking list of universal sustainability KPIs for the world’s hospitality industry.

Focusing on CO2 emissions, water and energy usage and waste management, the first wave of KPIs emphasised transparent and consistent methods of reporting for businesses to assess their performances.

The initiative is part of the COP29 Declaration on Enhanced Climate Action in Tourism, which set out to emphasise the importance of action within the hospitality industry to help tackle the global climate crisis while retaining economic sustainability.

The KPIs aim to drive consumers to make more sustainable travel choices and help hospitality businesses create positive change for the environment.

So, what does this mean for our customers? And how can we work together to make significant steps towards a sustainable future for the industry?

At Zonal Hotel Solutions, we are truly committed to helping our customers achieve the targets set out for them by organisations such as The World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance. Here, we discuss how our integrations and products can help hoteliers reach their sustainability goals.

Zonal’s Environmental Integrations

The hospitality sector accounts for up to 15% of UK greenhouse gases, and with growing concern amongst guests about sustainability, it’s never been more important for businesses to uphold their environmental promises. In fact, the latest findings by YouGov show that 64% of British consumers are willing to pay up to 10% more for sustainable foods and drinks and Visit Britain reports that 58% of people want to stay in accommodation with green awards and environmentally friendly practices.

Zonal’s host of environmental integrations are designed to boost your tech stack, and help your hotel go green.

Net Zero Now

Net Zero Now helps hospitality businesses reach the carbon emissions KPI set out by the alliance, with automated carbon accounting, tailored emissions reduction plans and a trusted Certification Mark.

The software automatically generates reports for all relevant disclosures and provides clear strategies for businesses on how to cut their emissions, while enhancing their brand reputation and building trust with green-conscious customers.

Play It Green

It’s been found that 81% of consumers believe companies should help to improve the environment, so Play It Green supports hospitality businesses to actively demonstrate positive change.

This integration offers diners in your hotel’s restaurant the chance to rebalance the carbon impact of their meals and gift to charity whilst paying their bill. Each automatically added (but non-fixed) £1 plants two trees and regifts 10p to charity. Play it Green also provides staff training on sustainable culture within the workplace and educational articles for hotels and restaurants.

GiftTrees

With our Gift Trees integration, it costs you nothing to help offset the environmental impact of meals from your hotel and help lift people out of extreme poverty. Diners in your hotel’s restaurants can opt into a small fee of £1.23 on their final bill to help provide farming families with food, income, access to education, clothing, medicine, and safe homes.

GiftTrees is seamlessly integrated with Zonal’s EPoS, allowing hoteliers to easily boost their societal impact and benefit the environment through investment in agroforestry systems.

Zero Carbon Forum

By helping businesses to drill down into their specific brand, site, supplier or ingredient-level emissions on a granular level, Zero Carbon Forum provides industry benchmarks to help each individual team member recognise the carbon impact of their daily practices whilst working at your hotel.

Through easily accessible and detailed data reports, this integration helps hospitality businesses identify the depth of their carbon footprint and put actionable processes into place to cut emissions and financial losses.

Waste Management

Restaurants and hotels lose a huge £2.6 billion to 1 million tonnes of food waste each year in the UK, 75% of which could be avoided. The World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance has calculated that 18% of all world food waste is created by the hospitality industry, citing it as a ‘priority’ within its recent KPIs.

To enable hoteliers to tackle this, Zonal’s Purchase-to-Pay system alerts kitchen staff when stock is running low and gives real-time recommendations for re-ordering and menu planning based on individual requirements and guest behaviour.

The software automatically sends an order to suppliers for fulfilment, saving chefs precious time and streamlining kitchen operations. This process significantly reduces food waste and over-ordering, greatly cutting costs and helping the environment.

As we move into 2025, it’s evident that sustainability must be at the forefront of every hotelier’s business plan. With help from Zonal’s comprehensive suite of technology, hitting sustainability KPIs will become more accessible, streamlined and comprehensive than ever.

To read more about the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance and COP29 Declaration on Enhanced Climate Action in Tourism, visit: https://sustainablehospitalityalliance.org/universal-sustainability-kpis-cop29/.

Hospitality loyalty programmes are booming – with big names such as Wagamama and Leon both recently launching their own schemes. Operators are increasingly adopting diverse methods to cultivate customer loyalty, leading to creative and engaging experiences for their customers. As part of our Loyalty Collective, where we gather top industry names to discuss all things loyalty in an open and honest conversation, we spoke with some of the industry’s top operators to explore various loyalty schemes they are implementing.

Gusto: Subscription-Based Membership

In March this year, Gusto become the UK’s first casual dining brand to launch a subscription-based membership programme. The Gusto Platinum Club is £65 a year or £6 monthly, and members receive 40% off food from Sunday-Thursday for themselves and up to three guests. Members also receive a complimentary bottle of Prosecco to take home upon sign-up and exclusive invites to menu launches.

This model not only rewards loyal customers but also encourages dining out during quieter days of the week.

And how is this working out for Gusto? Well, Kat Schofield, Marketing Director at Gusto, told us that the subscription model is boding well. Since launching, they’re seeing frequency of visits double, along with a noticeable increase in upsells. Kat says that customers are opting for nicer bottles of wine, or going for two rounds of cocktails, all thanks to the 40% discount off food.

Flat Iron: The Carcass Club

Flat Iron has taken a unique approach with its Carcass Club, which is a series of exclusive one-off events that highlight rare types/cuts of beef.
For £20 per person, attendees receive a delicious meal that includes a special steak, beef dripping chips, sauce, a glass of wine, and Flat Iron’s signature popcorn and Tahitian vanilla ice cream. This event is walk-in only and operates on a first-come, first-served basis, adding an element of excitement and exclusivity.

Darren Smith, Head of Operations at Flat Iron, said that by offering a slightly elevated experience, Flat Iron are cultivating customer loyalty without relying on a cut and paste offer. This approach makes each visit feel special and effectively showcases and promotes a particular restaurant.

Cosy: The Penny Club

At Cosy, loyalty takes on a tangible form with their Penny Club. Customers receive a physical coin that grants them access to a special offer: 2-for-1 house cocktails from Tuesday to Saturday. Membership is by invitation only, creating a sense of exclusivity. Customers share their name and favourite cocktail, which is recorded in a physical book at the cocktail bar, enhancing the personal touch of the experience.

Rosie Lewis-Marsh, Hospitality Sales and Marketing Consultant for Yummy Collection, emphasises the importance of having a compelling story behind loyalty programmes, rather than simply offering free points. She observes that the younger generation, who have always accessed music online through platforms like Spotify, are now rediscovering CDs and vinyl records. Rosie says that people crave something tangible and want to feel connected, like being part of a club, and this approach to loyalty schemes can create that club-like atmosphere, making customers feel truly involved.

These innovative loyalty schemes illustrate how hospitality operators are thinking outside the box to engage customers and foster lasting relationships. By offering unique experiences and personalised rewards, they are not just retaining customers but creating a community that keeps returning for more.

What with Wagamama and Mowgli recently launching loyalty schemes, Deliveroo investing in an advertising campaign to promote its Deliveroo Plus scheme this autumn and the news earlier this year that Pret A Manger was to ditch its much-feted subscription model, customer loyalty is a hot topic in hospitality right now.

But I don’t believe customer loyalty exists. Recently, I was approached by hospitality tech firm Zonal to see if I’d like to work with it on a project around this very subject. I started by telling a story about my love for Honest Burgers. We have an Honest Burgers right opposite our office. In fact, if the fire alarm goes off, it’s our designated meeting point. We have a lot of fire drills.

I loved going in there. The staff were friendly, the music was perfect, and it had plants everywhere that gave a really nice feel to the place. And I had a rather specific, rather odd order. I liked to have the plant burger, but I really like bacon, so I’d always add some of that on top, too. The vegan plus meat combination could have easily been a cause for confusion, but rather than causing issues, it simply became: “Would you like the usual, sir?”

Then, near Christmas, the manager of that restaurant left to go elsewhere. And when I next went in, everything had changed. The staff were still lovely, but the music had changed. She chose the playlists, apparently. The plants were all gone – also hers, brought in from home. And, when I put in my usual order, the waiter reappeared ten minutes later with a question from the chef: “Sir, just to check, did you really mean real bacon with that?”

Loyalty is an overused term in organisations and hospitality, and it’s a dangerous one. Because if leaders believe their customers are loyal they stop trying to impress them, focusing on winning them in the first place, then gradually taking their custom for granted.

Quite simply, if you stay more useful to your customers than the competitors and alternatives, your customers will stay with you. But if someone else becomes more useful – a better product, better price, better experience, more socially desirable brand – then they’ll go elsewhere. But where you can build some sense of loyalty is through your people – as Octopus, AO and First Direct show.

Octopus Energy is taking the highly regulated energy industry by storm by empowering its team to come up with creative ways to solve its customers’ problems. Customers hated the hold music, and so now, should you be put on hold by Octopus, you’ll hear a song from the year you turned 14 – the age that, on average, a person first engages with music. Another example is the Octopus Wheel of Fortune. Every time an Octopus customer enters a meter reading, they can spin the “wheel of fortune” to win anything from 1p to £512 credit on their account, and more than 100,000 of them a month do so. This shows an understanding of the inconvenience of submitting meter readings for customers and actively recognising and rewarding them for doing so.

Another industry you may not think to look at for loyal customers is white goods, but online retailer AO is one of the highest rated UK retailers of any kind on Trustpilot. That’s in no small part down to the fact that one of its core values is: “Treat every customer like your own gran.” But, more than this, staff are supported to deliver on this promise. Stories are manifold, from delivery drivers paying for pizzas when a new oven can’t be fitted in time for dinner to local teams arranging for an AO branded van to visit a six-year-old van fan on his birthday.

Likewise, banks are about as well known for building loyalty among customers as utility firms and white goods retailers, but talk to any customer of First Direct and most will extoll its virtues. Again, this is down to first-class customer service delivered by teams supported to do so. First Direct famously “hires for the smile, trains for skill”, and then enables its teams to listen to customers and act with empathy – no scripts, no call handling time targets and calls answered by real people.

The hospitality industry has a huge advantage over others in this, as a people-focused sector with colleagues who know that customer experience is crucial to delivering a great experience. There are other complexities to this, of course (the ambition of the leadership to provide excellent customer experiences, great training, a fundamental understanding of what drives your customers’ decision making, a recognition that not everything in good business must deliver an immediate return on investment).

However, while I maintain that customers are not loyal to businesses, I do believe they are loyal to other people – and these can be your people, assuming you give them the correct support and tools.