Wyndham Hotels Making Global Hospitality Green and Efficient

In virtually any business context, sourcing the highest-quality products and services for the best value to meet customer needs, while also being sustainable, is no small matter. When this is happening across approximately 500 hospitality properties across Europe, the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa (EMEA), it is a significant undertaking.

Welcome to the working world of Philip Halanen, Head of Sourcing and Sustainability EMEA at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the world’s largest hotel franchising company by number of hotels – with nearly 9,000 affiliated hotels (containing 819,000 rooms), and 23 hospitality brands across 95 countries. 

Halanen is responsible for the design and delivery of Wyndham’s regional sourcing strategy, which focuses on delivering a cost-effective yet sustainable and ethical supply chain for hotels across the EMEA region. This role ties in well with Halanen’s responsibility over the sustainability strategy of the EMEA division.

In today’s world, strategic sourcing is a hugely important part of a business’s overall strategy, often being the difference between feeling the full brunt of supply chain disruption or successfully navigating your way through it. Regarding ESG requirements, it can be the difference between compliance and hugely damaging non-compliance.

Wyndham Hotels stakeholders many and varied

Halanen is responsible for the design and delivery of Wyndham’s divisional sourcing strategy, which focuses on delivering a cost-effective yet sustainable, ethical supply chain for hotels across the EMEA region. Alongside this, he is also responsible for the company’s divisional sustainability strategy.

It is a job with multiple stakeholders and challenges on both the sourcing and sustainability fronts. 

“From a sourcing perspective, because we have various key markets across the region – you need to have suppliers who are local,” says Halanen. “This is to create efficient, sustainable supply chains with short lead times to market.”

This is why Halanen and his team constantly evaluate suppliers, to ensure they offer products and services “that are in line with our many and varied brand standards”. 

He adds: “We operate different brands across the region, and each has a different standard, so it’s very important that localised suppliers are aligned to these and that their products and services are what the hotels need and want.”

There is complexity, too, for Halanen on the sustainability side. He says Wyndham also constantly evaluates its suppliers to ensure they trade and operate ethically.

“We look at the labour they use in their manufacturing or creation processes, all the way through to their emissions,” says Halanen. “Suppliers need the relevant documentation to show us they are trading in a way that is sustainable and ethical.”

Halanen is a senior leader who is a specialist in managing complex operations and high-profile supplier partnerships.

He has international experience of designing, implementing and embedding supplier management and strategic procurement programmes across multiple sectors. 

Recently, Halanen has also diversified into sustainability leadership. His challenges are almost as complex as Wyndham’s stakeholders, and he concludes by pointing out that, to achieve success across sourcing and sustainability, “you need to ensure that people know why we're doing what we’re doing, and so communication is key”. 

“For me, it's my bread and butter; I talk about it every day. But for others, sustainability might not be an everyday conversation. With the Wyndham Green Programme or our Preferred Supplier programme, it's really important that people not only understand what you need from them but also what you're trying to achieve and the benefits that will bring them.”

The programme to which Halanen is referring is ‘Wyndham Green’, part of the group’s global social responsibility strategy. It comprises five key pillars:  Climate Change, Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, Water Conservation, Waste Diversion and Biodiversity.

Wyndham Green programme rolled out across globe

The programme is designed to help Wyndham’s hotels reduce their environmental footprints and operate more efficiently through eco-friendly initiatives, including energy and water conservation, waste diversion, operational efficiency, as well as guest and employee education and engagement. 

The programme has been rolled out across the globe, and has the capacity to take a hotel from doing little on sustainability, through to making all aspects of its operations and extended supply chain sustainable, including in the way it procures goods and services. 

Halanen reminds us there is a commercial point to sustainability, not just an environmental one: “It should be an important selling point for hotels, as consumers are really interested in staying in sustainable accommodation. 

“For example, making small investments in energy efficient light bulbs can not only improve your bottom line by reducing power consumption, but it can also go some way to improving the sustainability characteristics of your hotel.”

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