Earlier this year, HOTELS published Amadeus’ playbook for standing out in corporate travel RFP season. Joerg Schuler, EVP of hospitality commercial at Amadeus, made a notable point: start with data. His three closing principles—show up informed, stay visible, never stop paying attention—are how top sellers work an account. We would extend that to the column growing fastest on the corporate buyer’s scorecard: health and wellness, environmental responsibility and impact.
Know Your Customer
Leading with data starts before the negotiation with understanding what the account values. Corporate buyers increasingly publish their own health, wellness and environmental commitments. Read them closely: they are a specification brief hiding in plain sight.
We saw this at a branded hotel in a major U.S. metro market, where Mindclick supported a renovation that specifically targeted a nearby, high-value account, which published language on “new standards in health, wellness and sustainability.” Rather than invent criteria, we renovated to the client’s own words, category by category.
The metrics are real: Ten of 14 guestroom categories are responsibly sourced and 60% of the FF&E budget is verified for health, wellness and responsible sourcing. But they are only the entry point. It is the choices behind those numbers that capture a buyer’s attention. Touring the property, the account’s VP singled out alignment: carpet woven from reclaimed fishing nets mirroring the recycled-content standard her own company specifies and active air-cleaning in every room. Data starts the conversation; the verified health and wellness story of how the hotel got there brings it to life.
Why Travel Buyers are Asking
This is not a niche preference but a procurement requirement driven by several forces at once.
Regulation is one. Corporate buyers’ RFP criteria are increasingly shaped by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which pushes global companies to account for value-chain emissions—business travel among them—and to ask their hotels for the data.
But the pull runs deeper than compliance. Wellness is now a roughly $7 trillion global business, and travelers are buying it, especially in lifestyle, upper-upscale and resort segments. Companies and their customers expect the spaces where they sleep, work and meet to support well-being and that’s the story verified data allows a hotel to tell.
Distribution is another. OTAs and search surface hotels’ environmental performance (Booking.com and Google display it alongside price and location) and agentic AI travel search will accelerate it.
Procurement platforms are a third. The Alō index, a sustainability rating a Fortune 500 company uses for employee travel booking, is adding hotels and buyers to its platform, putting a verified rating into the booking decision. The spend follows: One major corporate retailer recently dropped five hotels across five markets for low sustainability performance, shifting an average of $260,000 per hotel to higher-rated properties.
Buyers tell us, too. In Mindclick’s interviews with corporate travel buyers across airlines, consumer products, financial services, pharmaceuticals and retail, roughly 15% to 20% of hotel selection now turns on environmental and impact data—often the margin between winning and losing.
Win More RFPs
Schuler’s framing points to the opportunity: If a fifth of the decision turns on environmental responsibility and impact, a hotel that can answer confidently—and prove it—has an edge competitors cannot easily match.
The proof lives in a hotel’s supply chain. Every product in a renovation and in daily purchasing carries health and environmental attributes that mostly go unsurfaced. Verify at the point of purchase and a compliance file becomes sales content. In our case study, the documentation that met ownership’s reporting obligation became a tool the director of sales could walk a client through. Their senior director of sales put it this way: “Following the renovation, we shifted our sales narrative. Previously, we sold primarily on location, brand reliability and standard Midtown comfort. Now, we market the hotel as a flexible, wellness-focused, third-party verified eco-retreat designed for modern corporate and bleisure travelers. Instead of just selling a room, we are now selling well-being, spatial versatility and verifiable corporate social responsibility (CSR).”
Those are verified, guest-language claims a salesperson can make without checking with anyone; Schuler’s three principles through an impact lens. Show up informed about an account’s published commitments; stay visible wherever buyers look, from RFP responses to rating platforms; and never stop paying attention—the signed contract isn’t the finish line, but the starting gun.
Standards keep evolving and hotels treating verified performance as a living asset, not a one-time cost, keep winning.
Story contributed by JoAnna Abrams, CEO, and Andrea Foster, EVP development–hospitality, Mindclick.