How hotels can meet the demand for sustainable stays

With the alarming number of extreme weather events dominating headlines in recent years and major reports warning of global warming, the impacts of climate change are no longer ignorable. As governments respond with more aggressive measures to curb carbon emissions, consumers increasingly expect companies to do their part and do good for people and the planet. According to the Harvard Business Review, companies that invest sufficiently in sustainability will outperform those that don’t, especially among younger consumers.

Travel is one of the key industries where consumers are realizing they need to be more sustainable. In Booking.com’s Sustainable Travel Report 2022, 71% of global travelers said they plan to travel more sustainably in the coming year, reflecting a growing commitment to making eco-friendly travel choices.

And yet, there is evidence that consumer interest in sustainable travel is stagnating at 75%, according to Booking.com’s latest Sustainable Travel Report. While this stagnation does not diminish the importance of sustainability in travel (three quarters of the population is not insignificant!), the stagnation can be attributed to the challenges consumers face in finding and booking sustainable travel options.

The biggest challenge is choice and trust. Although the availability of eco-accommodation is increasing, it is less obvious to find sustainable accommodation outside this category. How can you be sure that the hotel you have booked for a weekend in London prioritises sustainability and is not engaged in greenwashing activities? And how can hotels from the same group in different locations maintain consistent levels of sustainability to ensure that guests are not disappointed from one booking to the next?

Overall, consumers tend not to trust brands’ sustainability promises. And this is certainly true when it comes to travel.

According to Booking.com’s 2023 survey, nearly 40% of consumers said they do not trust the sustainability of the travel options available. About 50% think they are too expensive, probably because these options are more geared towards the luxury market. And yet, 45% of consumers in the 2024 survey say they find it appealing when they come across a property with a sustainability label, and 67% agree that all travel booking sites should use the same sustainable certifications or labels.

The message to companies is clear: to meet the demand for sustainable stays and ensure the credibility of their claims, hotel brands must be willing to prove that they are taking serious action towards the environment.

Recognized certifications from organizations like Green Key are the best way for hotels to demonstrate their environmental policies to the public. What these certifications mean must be clearly communicated in consistent terms across different booking partners. Presented this way, the mission seems fairly straightforward, but anyone involved in quantifying, analyzing and communicating sustainability in the hotel sector knows that this is far from true. Let’s find out why.

The path to sustainability

Adopting standardized reporting and certifications across the hospitality and travel industry is critical to scaling sustainability practices. Data is central to creating these standards, but existing sustainability data management practices don’t allow for this. Many hotels, even those that are part of large hotel groups, still collect and communicate their sustainability data manually – that is, via email and spreadsheets. It’s a decentralized, time-consuming process that’s prone to human error and leads to inconsistent experiences across hotels. Plus, it’s expensive.

We estimate that hotels using these complex, fragmented and manual approaches spend nearly $8 million annually on sustainability reporting with little to show for it. And because each eco-certification standard requires data based on its own parameters, data cannot be easily reused, creating a significant hurdle to innovation and scaling up sustainability initiatives across the industry.

For booking partners such as online travel agencies (OTAs), the challenges are similar. To communicate a hotel’s sustainability credentials to their customers, OTAs often receive an exported list of hotels in the form of a spreadsheet from the various certifiers and must then manually (and individually) match these with hotels in their database before they can create a sustainability category in their booking channels. As a result, it is nearly impossible for OTAs to process information in real time. This fuels consumer skepticism about the validity of a travel provider’s sustainability claims and deters some platforms from including sustainability as a search parameter.

In 2024, no hotel or booking partner should be managing their sustainability data manually. This practice causes them to miss out on revenue from the growing market of environmentally conscious travelers and puts them at serious risk of failing to meet sustainability reporting and compliance requirements. Governments around the world, such as the European Union, have begun implementing these standards for all companies operating within their borders.

Removing barriers to more responsible tourism

When siloed and outdated practices are the problem, the modern solution is to combine a hotel’s sustainability data and the data requirements of eco-certifiers and government regulators in a central, connected database. Although software to manage sustainability data has existed for many years, until recently there was no system that took into account the specific needs of hotels.

But with the introduction of purpose-built sustainability data management technology, hotels and the travel industry in general now have a streamlined way to manage their sustainability data. This solution acts as a hub or intermediary that centralizes all hotel sustainability data and efficiently routes the data between all relevant parties inside and outside an organization. Individual hotels, large chains, booking engines, industry organizations and eco-standard certifiers can all access the hub and push and retrieve data into the central database via API, enabling a high level of automation that was not possible before. What does this mean in practice?

First, hotels will gain access to the various sustainability certification frameworks and tools within the hub, giving them a more direct path to certification. For example, a platform with AI capabilities can help sustainability officers quickly evaluate the data needed to successfully complete a certification and alert them to any gaps that put their status at risk, while also allowing for data upcycling. This means that data is automatically mapped across different frameworks, allowing hotels to achieve more certifications faster and for less money. Any changes to the frameworks are also uploaded directly to the Sustainability Data Management Hub in real time to ensure there are no information gaps.

The same principle applies to government regulations such as the EU Sustainability Reporting Directive. A sustainability data management hub designed for the hotel industry should be able to integrate the government reporting frameworks into its database and provide hotels with only the relevant data points they need to produce audit-ready reports. This significantly reduces the time and cost hurdles to regulatory compliance.

But it’s not just hotels that benefit from a centralized hotel sustainability data management system. Booking platforms can also connect to eco-certifiers via the database and validate a hotel’s eco-label automatically and in real time, eliminating the possibility of greenwashing. This means customers have a wider choice of sustainable accommodations in almost every price range and can make decisions based on trustworthy, verifiable information.

Demand for sustainable travel options remains strong, but consumer fatigue is beginning to set in. To combat this fatigue, hospitality businesses must redouble their efforts to build trust through accurate and consistent sustainability reporting, leveraging recognized certifications to build confidence among travelers looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their trips.

Aside from increasing revenue, investing in a more automated, centralized and intuitive sustainability data management system helps hotels save on operational costs, meet compliance and reporting obligations despite increasing regulations, and gain an undeniable competitive advantage.

Most importantly, these measures enable more responsible tourism by providing travellers with trusted, sustainable options and ensuring that their travel experiences have a positive impact on the environment and local communities.