Many meeting and incentive planners and their agencies already are being asked by management to obtain more information on the sustainability practices of potential venues or other services, mostly focused today on the environment.

With the new EU CSRD, those questions will now extend to employees, the employees of supply chain and distribution partners, and practices related to the management of customers and distribution partners, communities affected by the organization, and the environment.

When the law fully takes effect, planners will be able to directly access (through a publicly available database) the audited corporate sustainability report of any company subject to the law, containing far more information than any organization discloses today.

For SITE members who work for hotels, airlines, cruise and rail lines or other companies subject to the law, the task of compliance will fall to senior management and will have little effect on most of their jobs, except perhaps for requests for information from their own management on practices or metrics related to supply chain and distribution partners.

Beyond fulfilling requests for these reports as they become available, SITE members will be affected to the extent that their organizations’ reports shed unfavorable light or raise questions about their practices, since the reports will require independent audits by the same firms that audit financial reports and will be comparable with other firms.

Creative DMCs can have a field day. They can help organizations source venues and services in line with client sustainability requirements under the new broader definition encompassing people, and they can help select experiences that support efforts by their clients to foster great alignment among their participants.

DMCs will be able to use the corporate sustainability reports to learn much more about their clients’ purpose, goals, objectives, and culture.

With only a few exceptions, most DMCs are not large enough to fall within the reporting scope of the new law; however, most would do well to provide a short corporate sustainability report of their own roughly aligned with the information required by companies subject to the law.

In the same way travel suppliers and DMCs can use the new reports to enhance their proposals and sales prospecting, incentive companies will find a treasure trove of information, including information on employee turnover, health, and wellness rarely before available.

These reports can be used to identify new prospects and to help design more effective programs for employees, distribution partners, supply chain partners, and communities.

Since only a few will meet the threshold of the new law, most will benefit from creating less comprehensive corporate sustainability reports to demonstrate their understanding of the law and its intent.

The new law is quite explicit in requiring disclosures related to practices and policies on terms and other aspects of relationships with distribution and supply chain partners, upon which the travel industry particularly depends. This includes information on pricing and other policies such as credit terms that are material to supply chain and distribution partners.

Sales departments will benefit by having access to unprecedented information about the purpose, goals, objectives, culture, and metrics of a prospect’s organization to create more thoughtful proposals and provide more tailored services.