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• The company extends the scope of the report to include international owned and leased hotels;
• For the second consecutive year, the information has been subject to independent external verification and receives the Global Reporting Initiative A+.
Meliá Hotels International presented its Sustainability Report for 2011 today, explaining the relevance of the hotel company strategy and commitments with regards to sustainability and social responsibility, including the calculation of the company’s carbon footprint, the publication of a new Code of Ethics, compliance with commitments to UNICEF, and the incorporation of the ONCE Foundation as an associate expert on accessibility and the recruitment and integration of people with disabilities.
In order to improve the quality and tracking of information, the Sustainability Report 2011 was created in accordance with the GRI 3.1 version, in which the number of indicators reported was increased (to 113 compared to 107 in 2010) and the scope of the report was expanded to include data from the company’s owned and leased hotels outside of Spain. Following their commitments to improvement, the hotel company also made an analysis of material to determine the most relevant topics – from the point of view of the report – for stakeholders.
During the press conference held today at the Meliá Castilla in Madrid, the Director of Strategic Planning and Sustainable Development at Meliá Hotels International, Lourdes Ripoll, explained that “our objective is to promote Meliá’s sustainable business model and encourage our stakeholders choose us due to the fact that we are a responsible hotel company. To achieve this, we must offer a value proposition that allows us to build a relationship of trust with them which is mutually beneficial in the long term”.
Amongst the milestones in 2011, highlights include the first calculation of the company’s carbon footprint. This indicator calculates a company’s impact on climate change and identifies the opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and represents a significant advance in the company’s environmental commitment. Another highlight is compliance with the company’s commitments to UNICEF, having tripled its target for the first year of the Strategic Alliance with the participation of 79% of hotels and 4,700 employees (through the “Solidarity Payroll” initiative). Another major milestone was the agreement signed with the ONCE Foundation in which Meliá is committed to hiring 60 people with disabilities over the next 4 years. As a result of this agreement, the company has already added 35 people to its workforce last year.
Finally, the company also announced the recent approval of its Code of Ethics, a framework inspired by the company’s renewed values and intended to serve as an element of unity amongst its employees.
Amongst the improvement commitments defined for 2012, the report highlighted the company’s definition of cultural positioning, the inclusion of sustainability criteria in its hotel management contracts and the provision of a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of each hotel and business unit, amongst others.
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