As travel demand continues to surge, Marriott International (MAR) is spearheading a movement to address one of the biggest social issues in the hotel industry.

"Human trafficking is a scourge on humanity, and unfortunately, a lot of it happens using hotels as an environment," Marriott International President and CEO Anthony Capuano told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "So several years ago, we developed an intense training program for our associates."

Initially introduced in 2016, the hotel chain's human trafficking awareness program trains employees on how to identify potential signs of human trafficking, monitor situations, and act or report on them while providing aid to victims.

The program aims to have all on-property staff fulfill these training requirements by 2025 across the hotel chain's 8,200 locations in 138 countries worldwide.

Over a million Marriott associates have already completed over 570,000 hours of this specialized risk prevention training. Additionally, over 800,000 workers at rival hotel chains such as Hilton (HLT) and Hyatt Hotels (H) have also participated in the training program, according to Capuano.

"We've got lots of work to do," the CEO stated. "But I can give you dozens of instances where our smart, focused associates have used what they learned in that training and actually thwarted human trafficking activity in progress."

How Marriott is tackling human trafficking

Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit and profit from individuals. It can take the form of forced labor, sexual exploitation, drug smuggling, or even debt bondage.

Activist organizations such as the Polaris Project estimated that there were at least 27.6 million people trafficked against their will in 2021. Alarmingly, incidents of human trafficking rose by 12% between 2016 and 2021, the report found.

State Department officials cited the Russia-Ukraine War and natural disasters tied to climate change as potential catalysts for increased trafficking activity. Although any person or group can fall victim to traffickers, homeless, LGBTQ+, and migrant youth have been found to be the most vulnerable demographics susceptible to human trafficking.

The criminal activity, which generates as much as $150 billion in illegal profits per year, has been a particular issue for the hospitality industry.

While proactive in the fight against human rights abuses, Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and Wyndham (WH) were among 12 hotel chains named in a flurry of 2019 lawsuits from trafficking victims that alleged violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in connection to the businesses' incidental profits derived from the criminal activity.