Richard Williamson

COO

After a difficult couple of years, the hospitality sector was starting to look forward with increasing confidence as hotels reopened their doors and welcomed back guests.

Now, we have been buffeted again by the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Beyond the immediate human misery and incredible suffering of millions of Ukrainians this has had the effect of kicking off a huge rise in energy prices and surging inflation around the world. Rising energy prices provide further impetus, if they were needed, for every business to re-assess their energy usage and cut costs wherever feasible.

With ESG now firmly on every corporate agenda, Considerate Group emerged from lockdown stronger, ready to serve existing clients and address new opportunities. We are working with increasing numbers of asset owners (asset managers, private equity and owner-operators), and have launched a new ESG due diligence solution into the market, to help assess the ESG risk and opportunity of hotel assets internationally at the point of acquisition.

Considerate Group has also extended its global reach, opening an office in New York and serving clients across Europe, the UK, the Middle East, the Caribbean and North America. Having only just established our US corporate entity, we are already in a position to celebrate our first US-based client.

We look forward to working with a diverse range of hospitality clients to help them embrace the opportunity that ESG presents and realise the benefits.

1. New product launch: ESG Due Diligence
2. Considerate’s international expansion
3. Regulatory update: Greenwashing being squeezed
4. Kicking off the year with ESG workshops

New product: ESG Due Diligence

In light of the growing environmental, social and governance (ESG) obligations for asset funds and asset managers, Considerate Group has developed an ESG Due Diligence product for the hospitality sector, designed to work alongside the traditional financial, tax and legal due diligence in transactions.

Considerate’s ESG Due Diligence surveys and reports are fully bespoke, offering a focus from the asset alone to a broad-based ESG contextual review, dependent on ownership type, the status of the asset and your specific needs. A standard ESG Due Diligence report assesses the asset’s current ESG performance, electricity, gas, water and waste usage/production, destination-based ESG risks and ESG competitor analysis, as well as asset-specific recommendations and opportunities.

Considerate Group’s Due Diligence product is aligned to the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), the EU Taxonomy for sustainable activities, UN Global Compact principles and other sustainability certification requirements (e.g. B Corp, Green Key). This aids asset owners in understanding where, in ESG terms, the asset sits in their current hospitality portfolio, and gives recommendations for improving the asset’s ESG performance, clarifying the investment opportunity and enhancing the long-term value of the asset. 

Benedetta Cassinelli

Managing Partner

Exciting times for our company!

Our co-founding partner Benedetta transferred to NYC last August and has been exploring the opportunities in the vast American market together with our first US employee, Anton Kelly.

It has quickly become apparent that there is a huge need for our ESG services in this market, encouraging us to establish Considerate Group USA Inc. to complement our offices in London and Munich, and amazingly we are already in a position to celebrate our first US-based client!

The Considerate Group team also continues to grow and develop as our roster of long-term client relationships expands: over the past six months we have welcomed six new members to our family of hospitality and sustainability experts - and we continue to hire, with outstanding positions for four new team members. To find out more about the whole team, visit our website.

Regulatory update:

Greenwashing being squeezed

Greenwashing – when a company misleads consumers into believing that they are more sustainable than they are – has been proscribed under both UK and European law. Any business that fails to comply with the law can now face action from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK, which has found that 40% of green claims made could fall foul of the new greenwashing legislation.

This is being treated, and rightly so, as a key issue of our time due to the potential long-term negative effects of greenwashing. And whilst you might assume that cracking down on greenwashing might focus on industries with a large carbon footprint, such as the oil and gas industry, the issue is prevalent across all industries including the hospitality sector.

Read our short blog to find out more about what counts as greenwashing, high profile examples in the hospitality industry, and how you can ensure you avoid it.

Considerate kicks off the year with

two ESG workshops

Our Team went to Warsaw to start the ESG journey with Leonardo Hotels, which is part of the Fattal Group (backed by Invesco and Pandox). In our first workshop with the core management team, we set the scene to establish an ESG framework and develop a strategy for the group’s over 160 European hotels.

“In a limited amount of time, the Considerate Team managed to get the senior Management Team and the board of Leonardo Hotels Group to work towards its objectives by making choices and applying focus”

We hosted edyn’s wider management team at our office in Paddington to begin planning the company’s sustainability strategy. We presented findings from our preliminary analysis to help guide edyn towards identifying some meaningful short-term sustainability goals that resonated with its ethos.

"The workshop was invaluable in bringing together perspectives from across our organisation and gain real consensus on the way forward"