You can access more information about HARP here.

HARP Member Benefits per Alliance:

HARP members engage suppliers in their sustainability rating and improvement journey as a peer group. Participating in this process offers various benefits, such as:

  • Strengthen supplier outreach resulting in an increased coverage of the assessed supply base (higher supplier participation)
  • Expand visibility of the broader hospitality industry’s supply chain sustainability performance allowing more informed decisions
  • Enhance synergies in driving improvement with suppliers and third parties
  • Directly engage with industry peers and influential external stakeholders without infringing antitrust regulations

HARP Supplier Benefits per Alliance:


If you have received a sustainability assessment request on behalf of HARP, you are considered as a trading partner for at least one member of this Initiative. Engaging in this process offers various benefits, such as:

  • Increase efficiency through sharing your scorecard with many customers at once
  • Gain visibility of industry leaders’ commitment to go beyond compliance and drive sustainability efforts in partnership with trading partners like yourself
  • Strengthen long-term customer relationships and valuable information about your positioning in all aspects of sustainability
  • Accelerate improvement via access to focused capacity building and improvement activities

Here’s Marriott’s press release, but there are very similar from other program participants:

Marriott International, EcoVadis and several leading global hospitality organizations – Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Radisson Hotel Group, and two global hospitality group purchasing organizations, Avendra and Entegra – today announced the launch of the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement (HARP).

Driven by members’ commitment to improve sustainability performance, the Alliance will work to accelerate sustainable practices by fostering close collaboration with trading partners to build transparency and scale positive impact across their value chains.

“As companies seek to engage their value chain partners in their sustainability efforts, they realize the complex scope, as well as common challenges, in their own sector,” said Richard Eyram, Chief Customer Officer at EcoVadis. “It is through partnerships and industry-wide collaboration that the hospitality industry can maximize its collective impact. By joining forces, aligning focus and sharing best practices, HARP members can achieve positive outcomes that pave the way towards Net Zero targets and a more sustainable future for all.”

Bringing a common voice, standard and platform around sustainability for the industry value chain, the HARP initiative addresses core challenges faced by its collective supplier sustainability programs including:

  • Scaling up visibility by strengthening supplier engagement rate, starting with the supplier assessment.
  • Accelerating suppliers’ performance improvement curve.
  • Enhancing the relevance of those engagements with a focus on the industry’s key categories.

To achieve all of these goals, HARP has chosen to utilize EcoVadis’ proven sustainability rating methodology, scorecards, and improvement platform. The EcoVadis Sector Initiative features are built as an antitrust-compliant network and allow for more efficient supplier onboarding, transparency, as well as collaboration and analytics. Together, these capabilities deliver HARP visibility across the hospitality supply chain’s sustainability performance and allow HARP members to align on the top priorities of their industry. This results in a positive message towards the supplier community and a more coherent direction to enable targeted improvement.

To realize this targeted improvement and meet the requirements of the hospitality industry, HARP member suppliers will have access to additional capacity-building and engagement activities, as well as tools and best practices.

Marriott and the seven HARP founding member collectively rated more than 2,000 suppliers upon the initiative’s founding. HARP plans to further expand this number to gain greater insight into the sustainability performance of its supply chain and drive maximum improvement.

Conclusion

The press release contains plenty of mumbo jumbo and could have been written by ChatGPT with an instruction to include all current procurement and sustainability buzzwords.

But interestingly, all these hoteliers are willing to work together and share information about their suppliers.

Is the real goal to squeeze even lower prices suppliers by pooling together purchasing power? I really cannot tell, and this would probably be an anti-competitive measure.