The Climate Traveler — Is climate travel a hospitality brand? | by Herb Hiller

6 min readApr 18, 2023

Marriott towers above hotel branding. The D.C. root beer stand that opened in 1927 has evolved into a globe circling titan of hospitality, a ubiquitous ambassador of American know-how with 30 brands in 139 countries. In his 2022 annual report to stakeholders, Marriott’s President and CEO Anthony Capuano shows that with 8,000 properties and almost 1.5 million rooms franchised or owned, Marriott’s dominance leaves all its competitors, which he names, playing catch-up.

So it’s almost entertaining that the report also contains seven pages that itemize all that can go wrong with leisure travel from fluctuating exchange rates to franchise failures and severe weather that can frustrate the achievement of otherwise normal projections of performance.

You’d think Marriott was a Norman Mailer character with a heart murmur taking up boxing.

Climate travelers show up twice in Capuano’s report, if neither time by that name. He says they can be disruptive if their numbers keep growing fast and if Marriott isn’t quick enough to enlist them by its commitments to drawdown, which the company says it’s phasing in across all its brands to reach net carbon zero by 2050. On the other hand, climate travelers might augment our loyalty to Marriott if it does act fast enough.

I do not mean to put the onus on anyone, yet it’s interesting that David Aaker, the master of brand strategy and vice chairman of the San Francisco consultancy, Prophet, who advises about everything from corporate culture to customer experiences, has also been evolving.

In a TV interview (in English) with Łukasz Murawski on his Polish Let’s Talk Brand program last year Aaker cautioned companies against deep dives into sustainability lest they sacrifice profits and fail. I hear an echo of the mastership outlook I once heard described by my boss and friend Ted Arison, who founded Carnival Cruise Line: that environmentalists and their elite think tanks masked a new phase of world Communism at work to take down capitalism.

Now in an 18th book due this fall about purpose-driven branding, Aaker describes “green” as a new form of branding, where you have to incorporate “new problems and issues into your purpose, your strategy, and your culture. You have to create signature branded efforts.”

Evolved though not altogether arrived

In an article in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR), you can read the abbreviated history that backdrops Aaker’s changing outlook.

HBR observes that financial disclosure rules and corporate accounting practices require almost no reporting on how customers value brands. Quarterly earnings dominate executive decision making and C-suite retention decisions. But powerful support nonetheless exists for customer loyalty as a profit driver.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the earlier of two contending advocates were on the one hand the social-philosopher-economist Peter Drucker, who was called “the father of business consulting” by Forbes, and his opposite, the Chicago University’s unalloyed capitalist Milton Friedman. For HBR, Drucker defined the true purpose of a business was to create and keep customers. Friedman, on the other hand, insisted that companies exist to maximize stockholder value. (Friedman in the same year as my talk with Ted would denounce corporate “social responsibility” as a socialist doctrine.)

Current adherents of Drucker’s social capitalism approach argue that companies that put customers first — not stockholders — can create even greater value for investors. For example, in 2019, the New York Times reported that CEOs from the Business Roundtable — including power

Business Roundtable leaders (credit, The New York Times)

players like Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mary Barra of General Motors, Robert F. Smith of Vista Equity Partners, and Larry Fink of BlackRock — “broke with decades of corporate orthodoxy by issuing a statement that the purpose of a corporation is no longer to advance only the interests of shareholders [i.e., investors]. Instead, companies must now deliver value on several new fronts: both directly to customers and indirectly by supporting customer values on issues like protecting the environment and dealing ethically with suppliers.”

Can climate travel become a brand?

Can a company get so out front on action that it becomes a “beloved” brand like Apple or Nike or even Coke? Is the game all this encompassing?

At this stage of reimagining, is travel and tourism where the food industry was only a few decades ago when “purpose driven” took hold with products branded as organic, ethically raised, plant-based, and locally sourced? For a time, growers of these products sold mainly through specialty distribution “health foods” stores, with their down-home in-group vibe. That was before Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and the growing shelf space allocated by Publix to its Greenwise brands.

Chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy Katharine Hayhoe says we have to start talking wherever we gather about climate action. In mid-April, The New York Times prepared us for this with a review of change that has to happen for electricity to replace fossil fuels across the American economy, and for the challenges that this will cause for business, consumers, and government to reach near zero drawdown.

So far, what Marriott has soft-pedaled as climate change is hardly a driving factor. While momentum exists around climate action, climate travelers ride a seemingly predictable and apocalyptic wave. Brand strategists may parse how much to budget for introducing next brands, but so far their implementing tools are ad budgets, hiring the smartest marketing people, influencers, and social media wizards.

What climate travelers also have is momentum that almost anyone anywhere now experiences whether sought or not. The no-longer-normal world we live in of violent and more than annual disruptions of our weather cycles are driving decisions about how we make choices that swell our ranks. For hospitality, climate action is becoming a “beloved” brand of super opportunities for a trade already providing vacation choices.

But it’s momentum still abnegated

When the Asian American Hotel Owners Association recently announced a new charity to support disaster relief, it said nothing about climate. The same when hotel-online.com declared 2023 the year of wellness, again nothing.

Meanwhile, leaders in turning to net zero have already entered into the marketplace. Standalone properties are serving climate travelers everywhere. CNN has identified mostly standalone properties that could create their own green networks, as Oyster has. One expansionist system is the lithe and agile 1Hotels. Are these today’s out front root beer stand?