Company: Greener Guest
Founder(s): Rachel McCaffery, Jo Hendrickx, Jen Bobbin & Steve Smith
Website: https://greenerguest.com/
Description: Sustainable supplies for the hotel and hospitality industry.
Founded in 2020, Greener Guest is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic from the global hospitality industry by making it easy for hospitality businesses to replace single-use plastic with sustainable alternatives.
Many hospitality businesses want to purchase more sustainably, but don’t have the time, knowledge or capacity to research the social and environmental impacts of every product they buy. GreenerGuest.com is a one-stop shop: the Marketplace offers sustainable hospitality products, while the Learning Zone features free and low-cost plastic reduction tools to provide businesses with the knowledge needed to cut single-use plastic and operate more sustainably.
An average-sized hotel will consume upwards of half a million items of single-use plastic annually. Collectively, the hospitality industry is responsible for billions of tonnes of plastic waste each year. This is harming wildlife and human health – and the increase in plastic use since the start of the Covid crisis has only made the problem worse.
The pandemic and the associated hospitality shutdown delayed Greener Guest’s launch but enabled time to be invested in tech development and marketing strategy. The MVP is live and has been soft launched, with hard launch and marketing campaign scheduled for early May 2021. Greener Guest has global relevance and will be seeking investment to scale-up internationally in due course.
Greener Guest is being recognised as a dynamic and innovative business. The company was selected from thousands of other applicants for a place on the business accelerator run by the world’s largest travel company, booking.com and was awarded funding for a discrete development project.
As ‘Booking Cares’ alumni , Greener Guest has access to ongoing advice, mentoring and strategic insights from booking.com. Greener Guest were also highlighted as ‘One to Watch’ in the World Responsible Tourism Awards 2020 and have been shortlisted for the Southampton FC ‘Halo Award’.
