MCLEAN, VA.—Hilton Worldwide announced Meet with Purpose, a concept designed to make it easier for meeting professionals to reduce waste and incorporate health and wellness into meetings and events. Meet with Purpose provides meeting professionals with sustainable choices to incorporate into events that not only enhance the experiences of attendees, but also align with many customers’ corporate responsibility goals. Inspired by Hilton’s corporate responsibility strategy, Travel with Purpose, Hilton gathered feedback from customers and sales Team Members to identify the most pressing sustainability issues for meetings and events. To meet these needs, Hilton created Meet with Purpose, supported by two focus areas:
• Mindful Eating encourages meeting professionals to reexamine event dining to minimize food waste and encourage healthy choices. Hilton offers solutions such as portion control, sourcing locally, pre-plating salads and establishing central water stations with reusable containers.
• Mindful Meeting inspires meeting professionals to host more sustainable events by considering practices that are less resource-intensive. The solutions range from using paperless registration and placing notepads in a central location to turning off climate control when a meeting room isn’t in use.
Meeting Success Stories
When put into practice, Meet with Purpose can have a large impact on an event. As examples:
• Last September, Hilton San Francisco Union Square hosted an event that typically draws approximately 60,000 attendees. Hilton’s team helped the company recycle 66,858 pounds of waste material, source approximately 30 percent of energy from renewable sources and contribute more than 1.3 tons of food donations.
• Additionally, Hilton Chicago has a robust recycling and composting program, efficient water systems and partners with local farms to source food locally in addition to growing their own vegetables on a rooftop garden. The hotel works with customers to incorporate these practices into meetings and events hosted at the hotel to add value to the event for attendees and the host company.
“Today’s meeting attendees seek greater meaning in their event experiences and expect event planners to consider the broader implications of the meeting itself,” says Lesley Brasesco, Hilton Worldwide’s Managing Director of Sales Effectiveness for the Americas. “Meet with Purpose offers meeting professionals a menu of options that make it easy to incorporate sustainable, impactful and healthy choices that deliver on the broader corporate responsibility commitments of our customers and Hilton.”
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