On October 20th, a key conference Climate Action: Driving Competitiveness was delivered by Fáilte Ireland and the Irish Hotels Federation (IHF)
Against the backdrop of a government target to cut emissions from commercial buildings by 45% by 2030, there is a sharpened focus on reducing emissions across the commercial built environment. This challenge – and the opportunities it brings – was at the heart of the Climate Action: Driving Competitiveness conference, hosted by Fáilte Ireland and the Irish Hotels Federation (IHF) on 20 October.
The event was chaired by well-known broadcaster and author Matt Cooper and was notable for the collaboration between Fáilte Ireland and the IHF, along with its connections with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, based at Cambridge University in England.
Why Climate Action Matters for Tourism
Jenny De Saulles – Director of Sector Development – describes her role in Fáilte Ireland as one principally of supporting the tourism sector at a national and sectoral level, with climate action being one of those areas of support. Unsurprisingly, it is an area of burgeoning importance and activity.
“From a carbon-impact perspective, hotels and larger tourism buildings account for a significant share of emissions,” says Jenny. “Government has set clear targets for Commercial Buildings – including a 45% reduction in emissions by 2030 – and that places our sector firmly within the national priority areas for action.”
“In tourism, that includes hotels, large guesthouses, and large attractions. Our Board has tasked us specifically with supporting these building types, helping them to understand their baseline, identify the quickest and most cost-effective improvements, and ultimately reduce their carbon footprint in line with national policy. The good news for tourism businesses is that cutting your carbon footprint goes hand in hand with lower energy bills and reduced day-to-day running costs”.
The Climate Action Programme: Support, Savings and Sector-Wide Progress
The opportunity and necessity for improvement in the hotel sector is significant and Jenny says that Fáilte Ireland has been working closely with the IHF on carbon footprint reduction in the sector over the last number of years.
“We now have over 300 businesses participating in the Climate Action Programme and 180 of them are hotels,” adds Jenny. “And what we’re hearing back from those hotels on the programme is that it’s making a massive difference.”
The massive difference that the programme is generating isn’t just about doing the right thing, it is also about saving real money, with the average annual saving for a hotel (mainly on energy costs’ savings of up to 10%) being in the region of €35,000, with little to no capital investment.
The programme is about guidance more than anything else, with many companies feeling at a loss as to where to go next when it comes to turning the elusive concept of sustainability into concrete action. There are lots of service offerings in this area and many companies simply find it hard to navigate through it all – particularly when the language used makes little sense to the average facility-owner or manager in the tourism industry.
What the support initiative from Fáilte Ireland (in place since 2024) aims to do is to make it a one-stop-shop for companies in the tourism sector seeking to become more sustainable.
“The Climate Action Programme is very much about putting all of the support together in one place,” says Jenny, who adds that it’s a great opportunity for tourism businesses to hear from others in the sector. It’s networking of sorts but more importantly, it serves as mutual inspiration when one hotel hears what all their competitors are doing in this space.
“As part of this whole journey, we’ve partnered with the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership. We took nearly 20 businesses over on that course at the beginning of the year and the inspiration that they took from that was wonderful; it enabled them to see that this was a commercial decision. It wasn’t just about environmental concerns.”
Driving Change Through Knowledge, Partnerships and Customer Demand
The objective of the October conference, she says, was to primarily showcase what the sector was doing but also to inspire those who aren’t yet on the journey to get on the bus, so to speak. The advantage of having the Cambridge-based institute was to have properly researched scientific facts on hand.
The importance of having impactful green policies in a country that has a deep- rooted image as a green country doesn’t need to be overstated. It’s important to back up our image with strong visible policy.
This manifests itself in the manner in which both competitors and customers are asking companies not only what companies’ sustainability policy is but also to be able to show what they are doing.
“This is one of the reasons we created the Climate Action Programme,” says Jenny, “so that businesses can talk with certainty about what they’re doing.”
The average customer also considers sustainability when choosing their holidays – another driver in the mix but a vitally important one in such a customer-focused business.
“75% of international travellers say that they want to travel more sustainably in the next 12 months,” says Jenny, quoting Booking.com’s 2024 Sustainable Travel Report. “That’s something we can’t ignore.”
In the first year of Fáilte Ireland’s Climate Action Programme, companies are given dedicated one-to-one advisory, and the focus is very much about reducing costs and putting a bespoke action plan in place which is tailored to a business’ needs. This is more about medium-term thinking in terms of sustainability; trying to answer the question of where does one want to be in 5-10 years. It’s all about incremental steps being taken on a journey that won’t happen overnight.
“It’s not about forcing people to do something. It’s actually about flagging to people that this is a competitive advantage that is going to reduce their costs and increase their reputation as a tourism business over time.
“I’ve had a number of hotels come back to me after the conference and say, ‘In my head, I thought this was going to cost me money and that it would be difficult and challenging, but what I saw on the day was that there’s support there that’s going to make it easy and more importantly, I’m going to save money’.”
A Unified National Effort: Cross-Agency Collaboration Accelerating Progress
The new positioning of the Tourism sub-ministry within the Ministry of Enterprise has also played its part.
“We’re getting more exposure to agencies like Enterprise Ireland and the IDA,” says Jenny. “We get to share ideas much more so it’s a very positive development for tourism.”
At the conference, Tom Randles (Randles Hotel, Killarney), Liam Moran (FBD Hotels & Resorts) and Catherine Lonergan (Trigon Hotels) all gave real testament as to the achievements on their own sustainability journeys – something which cut through the theory and presented real examples of different-sized businesses enthusing about sustainability in action.
The Climate Action Programme has now developed into one of the strongest cross- agency collaborations in the sector. Over the past two years, Fáilte Ireland has built a formal partnership network spanning the SEAI, Skillnet Ireland, Local Enterprise
Offices (LEOs), and a wide range of regional and industry bodies. These partnerships are now embedded into how the programme operates, ensuring businesses get consistent advice, expert training, access to finance, and a clear roadmap for taking action.
“We’ve worked hard to create a genuinely co-ordinated system,” says Jenny. “We meet regularly with each of our partners, we’ve agreed common targets, and we’ve aligned our supports so that a business entering the Climate Action Programme can move seamlessly from advisory, to training, to funding, to implementation. That has always been the goal – a one-stop pathway from ambition to action.”
Within this highly positive framework, the mood at the conference was unmistakable: sustainability is no longer a side project. It is becoming a core driver of competitiveness and resilience for Ireland’s tourism industry – and the Climate Action
Programme, strengthened by these national partnerships, is now the engine pushing that change forward.
Footnote: Research Source Booking.com https://phoenixwipes.com/do-travelers- pay-for-sustainability/
