Knowing and understanding the key issues that concern all our stakeholders is critical for the long-term success of our responsible business strategy. This enables us to ensure our reporting is up-to-date and continues to be relevant.
Our materiality survey
The Company undertook a comprehensive survey of our stakeholders to identify the most important social, environmental and well-being issues to them. This materiality assessment asked what our key stakeholders viewed as important to them and what was most impactful on global sustainability. This assessment surveyed more than 4,000 guests, team members and partners. The outcome was then reviewed in consideration of the International Tourism Partnership industry-wide mapping analysis of social, ethical and environmental matters to form a scatterplot of key issues which our Responsible Business programme considered as primary focus areas.
See the materiality assessment scatterplot (below). This materiality assessment continues to guide our specific initiatives which we now identify in terms of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The survey structure
The participants were grouped into three major categories:
- Guests – sub-divided by corporate guests, leisure guests, corporate meeting and events, personal event, restaurant and bar and spa
- Partners and suppliers – sub-divided by supplier of goods and services, education partner, charity partner, corporate partner and employment partner
- Team members – sub-divided by hotel, corporate or regional office, restaurant and bar and spa
This provided an opportunity to see the importance by category and well as to see how aligned the responses were between guests and PPHE as well as partners and PPHE.
A link to the online survey was emailed to all participants. There were 14 questions which were grouped around the four pillars of Responsible Experiences: Inspiring Guests; Creating Centres of Excellence; Developing our People and Being Part of our Communities. The participants were asked to rate the questions (from one to three) according to two criteria:
- Importance to me
- Impact on global sustainability
We also included an open-ended question that asked if there was anything they would like to add.
The results
We were very pleased to receive over 4,000 completed surveys across all participant groups. Almost 92% of respondents were guests, which was expected since they are by far the largest audience. The large percentage of respondents being in one category could be seen to skew the comparative results but we still feel the comparisons are meaningful and indicative of trends. The low number of partner surveys (34, <1%) did not really create statistically meaningful results, but again, were used from an indicative point of view.
Overview of key findings:
- The average of all responses was greater than 2 so a weighted scatter plot was also used to give more detailed comparisons
- Guest safety was the highest ranked on importance
- Recycling was the highest ranked on impact
- Local charity and local community contributions were low in both importance and impact
Individual measures
- All responses averaged a score greater than 2
- Guest safety was the highest ranked on importance
- Recycling was the highest ranked on impact
- Local charity and local community contributions were low in both importance and impact
Measures by pillars
- Inspiring Guests ranked highest on importance
- Creating Centres of Excellence ranked highest on impact
- Being Part of our Communities ranked lowest on both dimensions
Structure
Scatter plots were used to compare and show the relationships between the categorised circles, by the use of positioning along the x and y axis. The overall picture of the scatter plot was used to analyse patterns and visual correlations for both the individual parameters and the grouped parameters by pillar.
Conclusion
We have used the ‘individual measures’ and the ‘measures by pillar’ to prioritise the most material issues and impact when developing the activity within our Responsible Experiences strategy and its goals and measures.
Materiality going forward
Although we were very happy with the results from our first materiality survey, there are many areas upon which we can improve. We would like to increase the amount of responses from our partners and suppliers. We would also like to increase the diversification of responses from our team members to ensure a more balanced response from every functional and regional area of our business.
Our ESG strategy requires our being responsive to the views of our stakeholders and the needs of an ever-changing world. As views can change rapidly, it is important that this materiality process is an ongoing exercise.