InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is a British multinational hospitality company headquartered in the UK, operating more than 6,800 hotels in over 100 countries worldwide. Its portfolio includes brands such as InterContinental, Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza.

Reason for engagement

The hospitality industry is a sector with a high risk of modern slavery. It is typically a low pay sector, highly reliant on migrant workers in roles such as security, cleaning and catering. It is also associated with human trafficking for sexual exploitation.

What we did

We first engaged IHG on this theme more than a decade ago, specifically concerning the risk of child sex trafficking in the run-up to the London Olympics. In recent years, we have also engaged with the firm on its approach to paying the Living Wage.

IHG is one of the companies assessed and ranked annually in the CCLA Modern Slavery UK Benchmark; we have been benchmarking its approach to modern slavery and forced labour since 2023. We have had several discussions with IHG’s human rights team about what the company could do to improve and have found this to be a thoughtful and engaged company with a sophisticated understanding of human rights risks.

Outcomes

We were delighted when, in 2025, IHG reached performance tier 1 in the CCLA Modern Slavery UK Benchmark, considered ‘leading on human rights innovation’. In its human rights disclosures published in 2025 IHG:

  • Improved the information it provided on human rights due diligence processes, including details on audit prioritisation and protocols.
  • Provided detail on processes to strengthen monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of responsible labour requirements, piloting a new self-assessment process and conducting on-site assessments at selected hotels in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
  • Discussed how several hotels had shared that outsourced workers’ passports had been held by a third-party labour provider and how IHG had worked to ensure workers could access these essential documents.
  • Published new guidelines for hotels on how to investigate and remediate worker-paid recruitment fees and costs.
  • Explained how it had partnered with civil society organisations to raise awareness of trafficking for sexual exploitation around the Paris Olympics and the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

Furthermore, we were pleased to see IHG disclose in its 2024 annual report that ‘the Real Living Wage will be applied for 12 months from April 2025, as a minimum, for all staff in line with the Real Living Wage Foundation level; zero-hour contracts are not utilised in the UK leased estate. Between 2023 and 2025, entry level salaries in our UK leased hotel estate increased by 15% relative to 7% budgeted increases for our corporate population including senior management’. IHG has not taken the step to gain full accreditation from the Living Wage Foundation, but it is an important step towards matching the real Living Wage.