Case Study: Morris Group

Industry

Tourism & Hospitality

Location

Approximately 25 sites across, QLD, VIC, NT, & WA

About Morris Group

Morris Group is an independent, family-run Australian business operating a diverse portfolio of tourism, hospitality, aviation and technology ventures across Australia. Its properties span luxury resorts and wilderness lodges, urban pubs and craft breweries, superyacht charters, and helicopter operations.

The company's best-known properties include Ardo (a luxury hotel on the edge of the Coral Sea in Townsville, pictured above), The Ville Resort–Casino in Tropical North Queensland, Orpheus Island Lodge on the Great Barrier Reef, and a collection of Melbourne's most iconic pubs through Morris Hospitality including The Albert Park Hotel and Portsea Hotel.

Before Working with Climate Zero

Like many hospitality businesses of its size, Morris Group had no dedicated sustainability resource. Emissions data existed across the business, spread across 25 sites, but there was no centralised system and no structured process for bringing emissions data together. The business was unable to manage reporting requirements in an efficient, consistent and consolidated way and there was no clear roadmap for how to get from raw operational data at the site level to a compliant emissions report.

The reality was that the work to collate the data was going to be genuinely challenging and the absence of a centralised platform made it difficult for different parts of the team to contribute to the work in a coordinated way.

Why Morris Group Looked for Help

Morris Group has always recognised its responsibility to protect the remarkable environments surrounding its many locations and the company takes its compliance obligations seriously. The question was how to be ready to report without a sustainability team in place.

Meeting the mandatory ASRS reporting obligations accurately and on time was always going to be no small feat as a multi-site hospitality operation with no dedicated internal sustainability expertise and using excel as a collation/reporting tool.

Morris Group's Decision-Making Criteria

Morris Group needed a solution that could work for a team that wasn't starting from a position of sustainability expertise. The key criteria were:

• A platform purpose-built for the Australian regulatory context (ASRS/AASB S2 alignment)
• The ability to centralise data across multiple sites without requiring a dedicated sustainability hire to operate it
• Audit-ready outputs that could stand up to mandatory reporting requirements
• A team willing to work closely with them through implementation, not just hand over a tool and walk away
• An intuitive system with straightforward onboarding for diverse roles and functions across a complex, multi-site business.
• Flexibility in licence, with the ability to unlock advanced functionality as needed, providing competitive annual licence fees
• Access to expert advisors for end-to-end reporting support when needed

After Working with Climate Zero

What changed

‍The most significant shift was structural. Climate Zero didn't just give Morris Group a place to store data, it gave the team a framework to organise around. With a centralised platform, different people across the business could contribute their piece of the data puzzle without everything depending on one person or living in one spreadsheet.

For a business without a dedicated sustainability resource, this was the key unlock: Climate Zero became the forcing function. It created the internal structure and accountability that allowed the individuals in the team to collaborate on something none of them had done before.

The honest reality

‍The implementation wasn't frictionless. Getting data from 25 sites still required internal effort and commitment; Climate Zero didn't remove that need, as no software or spreadsheet can. What it did was make that effort manageable, purposeful and structured rather than chaotic and undefined. The lesson Morris Group can offer to others in the same position is: you can't avoid doing the work, but if planned well the inevitable team frustrations can be managed.  

What's next

‍The hard work is done and Morris Group now has a proven, repeatable process they can run again without starting from scratch. Each quarter, the data collection becomes more familiar and the effort decreases.

From here, the foundations are in place to move beyond measurement. With a clear picture of where their emissions are coming from, Morris Group can begin setting meaningful reduction targets and building a transition plan that the whole team can contribute to, even without a dedicated sustainability resource.