Stakeholder engagement

In the past year, Whitbread has carried out a detailed review of its corporate responsibility strategy in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, consulting with circa 10,000 guests and over 1,000 team members regarding its approach to the environment and corporate responsibility.

Our research demonstrated that our guests and team members have a high level of awareness and concern for environmental issues with over 77% of them are making lifestyle changes as a result of their concerns.

For our guests, the primary drivers of choice are still quality, service, value for money and convenience. However, these are closely followed by corporate responsibility drivers, such as healthy eating and the environment.

Our team members think that it is important to care about the environment and the majority (63%) said that Whitbread's environmental performance mattered to them.

This report reflects the issues that are important to these stakeholders and appropriate to our businesses, namely:

New corporate responsibility strategy

The views of our stakeholders have been used to develop our new corporate responsibility strategy that is being embedded within the Company during our financial year 2009/10.

The seven key focus areas of the new strategy will be:

The structure and content of next year's report will reflect our new strategy, objectives and targets.

Energy and Environment Guide

Whitbread has over 33,000 team members and they can clearly play a significant role in helping the Company to reduce its impact on the Environment.

To engage our team members and give them the information and tools that they need to do this, in 2009 we launched an 'Energy and Environment Guide' within Whitbread Hotels and Restaurants.

Developed in-house, the guide is designed to help our teams understand their energy and water usage and their waste disposal requirements; and to help them to identify opportunities to make improvements in each of these areas.

Each site will nominate a corporate responsibility champion, who is tasked with taking ownership of the guide. It will be their responsibility to carry out monthly audits, identifying opportunities to improve their energy and water consumption and completing any actions arising from each monthly audit.

Every month, there will be a specific focus area such as lighting, so that our champions can start tackling issues in a co-ordinated and structured manner. This also means that we can tackle seasonal issues such as cooling our buildings in the summer months.

In addition to the audit, the kit also contains posters, stickers, thermometers and green tip housekeeping cards, to allow the CR champion to communicate the activities and initiatives that are taking place onsite and engage their colleagues. To enable sites to monitor their progress, monthly energy reports are also available showing actual real time energy usage enabling sites to mitigate business cost and create team energy awareness.

Premier Inn directory

Premier Inn's popular pocket-sized directory helps its regular and return guests to find a Premier Inn hotel when they are travelling around the country.

When reprinting the directory this year, Premier Inn has taken the opportunity to include some tips for guests to help them understand how they can reduce their impact on the environment when staying in one of its hotels.

The environmental tips included in the directory are:

1. Don't turn up the heating unless you really need to
   Unless it's too cold for comfort, try to keep your thermostat turned down as low as possible. Energy consumption increases by up to 8% each time you increase the temperature by just one degree.
2. Keep doors and windows closed in cold weather
   If you're too hot, try turning the heat down first.
3. Switch lights off in empty rooms
   You could save energy by as much as 15% just by making sure you turn off the light when you leave your room.
4. Don't use more light than you need
   If you're only using one part of a room, why have all the lights on? Don't strain your eyes, but try not to use more light than you need.
5. Make the most of natural light
   Keeping your curtains or blinds open will allow maximum daylight to enter the room and significantly reduce the need for electric lighting.
6. Switch off electrical equipment when you're not using it
   Switching off you TV or laptop instead of using standby saves energy and means your equipment will last longer.
7. Save water
   Taking a shower uses much less water than running a bath and also remember to turn the tap off while brushing your teeth.
8. Reuse towels where possible
   If you're staying for more than one night, re-using your towels will save both water and laundry products, which pollute the environment.
9. Don't overfill the kettle
   When boiling the kettle, fill with only the amount of water required for your drinks, as overfilling will waste valuable energy.