Inge Huijbrechts is one of the most influential voices in sustainable innovation and corporate responsibility in global hospitality. As the Chief Sustainability and Security Officer at Radisson Hotel Group, she leads the company’s award-winning
Responsible Business programme, overseeing more than 1,400 hotels in their transition to net zero. A speaker at The Sustainability Speakers website, Inge is highly regarded for her practical insights on embedding sustainability at scale – especially across complex, international operations. Her work has earned global recognition, from launching Hotel Sustainability Basics with the WTTC to securing industry awards for innovation and environmental impact.
In this interview, Inge shares her views on the biggest challenges companies face when implementing sustainability, the leadership qualities needed to drive change, and how businesses can put corporate ethics and responsibility into real action. It’s a valuable read for anyone serious about making sustainability more than just a statement.
Q: What are the biggest challenges businesses face when implementing sustainability at scale, and how can they overcome them?
Inge Huijbrechts: “Yes, that’s an excellent question. I think many businesses, if you look behind the brand, are actually much more complex in legal structure or in geographical spread than you would imagine.
So, I think for many businesses, it is all about how you truly engage stakeholder – whether those stakeholders are business partners, your supply chain, or, for example, in the case of hospitality, real estate and asset owners.
This is a global network of stakeholders we need to bring on a path to net zero and net positive – to go beyond that. And as you can read in many important works, not least the book by my hero Paul Polman, Net Positive, it is really about creating that system change.
So, I think it’s about thinking big, having a vision, and being bold in your outreach. That is how you create sustainability at scale. And then of course, we need to think about financing, and we need to think about pioneering”.
Q: Which leadership qualities are key for sustainability transformation?
Inge Huijbrechts: “Personally, I think first of all, you need to understand the business. If you want to be an impactful sustainability leader, you need to understand the business you’re in and the business that your key stakeholders are in.
It’s all about how you speak their language and how you understand, as a generalist, the business priorities of your own business and your key stakeholders’ businesses. That is a key thing.
Then the second thing is, of course, we learn every day. In the field of sustainability, there has been a massive transformation and specialisation in the last 10 years, roughly. The field is constantly coming up with new compliance requirements, new regulatory requirements, which are essential in terms of transparency, but also new technological context.
If you talk about what is possible in the decarbonisation of buildings, if you look at new building materials, circularity in FF&E, the way you equip hotel rooms, or new energy mechanisms of decentralised renewable energy – all these things are innovating and changing.
So, you need to have this curiosity. Curiosity to see what is out there. What can I learn? Curiosity, humility, and being a generalist, I think, is what you need to lead a sustainability transformation”.
Q: Can you share some key takeaways from your Think Planet and responsible business initiatives that business owners can apply to their operations?
Inge Huijbrechts: “If we’re talking about key takeaways, I think we have been quite successful in reducing our footprints in Radisson Hotel Group. We actually just published our new sustainability report today.
That’s a major annual event. In it, you can see that we have reduced our carbon emissions by 33% compared to our reference year 2019, and we have reduced our water footprint in one year by more than 20%.
So, we are doing things very successfully. I think the way we are doing things is that we have a clear strategy and a clear vision. Our decarbonisation strategy and our targets are super ambitious – as they have to be.
It’s decarbonised by 2050, but also by 2030 – which is just a few years away – we’re aiming to reduce our footprint by 46%. The ambitious targets are there. The leadership buy-in is essential.
In our world, sustainability is part of the company’s strategy. We have a very performing five-year plan, and we made sustainability part of that from the very beginning. When the new CEO and leadership team joined the company, the first thing I did was to make sure that sustainability was part of this corporate strategy.
That makes it interconnected with all the relevant teams – whether that’s the growth of the hotel portfolio or the technical design of the portfolio, and financing, for example. This interconnectedness is really important.
Then of course, the other stakeholders. Our employees – how do we engage them? With campaigns like Green Operations: Move to 0, which we do every year on a regular basis. We engage them. We make them shine in their daily work; in anything they do in a hotel. Whether you are a chef, front office manager, back of house, an engineer – you can be involved.
And the last big stakeholder group is: how do we engage the guests? Because the guests create the pull, create the drive for generating more revenue from sustainability.
We do this by making sure that all our hotels are, at minimum, applying 12 actions on sustainability – which is like an entry-level sustainability label. We can talk to the guests. The guests want this – 84% of guests say they want to travel sustainably.
84% of guests. If we can answer that, we’re really talking effectively to the guests, and we cover all these stakeholder groups who we need as partners in this net zero transformation.”
Q: Sustainability is one facet of corporate responsibility. How else can businesses prioritise corporate ethics and governance?
Inge Huijbrechts: “I would say it’s all part of the same mix, right?
In our world, it’s Think People, Think Community, and Think Planet. Everything about environmental sustainability is Think Planet. Everything else is Think Community – about meaningful interactions with the local community. And Think People – it’s all about caring for the people in our hotels and our supply chains.
So, this goes hand in hand. A lot of these things are interconnected. If you are a responsible citizen in your community, you’re going to care about providing meaningful jobs that can be a multiplicator for livelihoods in that community.
In many communities, even in inner cities, we are part of regeneration or tourism development – as an international brand who is often the first to go somewhere. If you create those connections in a meaningful way in your community, you’re going to be better off in acceptance, in the licence to operate, in your resilience.
It’s part of what any company needs to do. Thinking about people is really about thinking about your employees and your customers.
Customers are very conscious about the choices they make in their daily lives – the way they buy, travel, live, and any product they need. Especially the younger generations are super conscious about the brands and the purpose behind the brand. That counts when they become employees, or they are our employee base as well.
You can see that applicants today also want to work for a company with a purpose. I think it’s about 75 or 80% of applicants today who say they look up a company’s purpose before they apply. It’s really a 360-degree view of being a meaningful company with a purpose that is sustainable.
Then of course, governance and compliance are all about transparency – building trust, being real and truthful about the progress you make, and having the systems in your company to support that. I don’t think governance can be missed in the ESG equation either”.
This exclusive interview with Inge Huijbrechts was conducted by Jack Hayes, Director at The Sustainability Speakers Agency.
