By: Julien Etchanchu, Senior Director, Sustainability Consulting
Despite recent talk about environmental concerns losing momentum, it’s clear that business travelers still care about making responsible choices on the road.
In fact, 83% say sustainability is an important factor when planning business trips. However, while the airline sector has made significant progress in measuring and communicating travel-related environmental impact, this information remains somewhat neglected in the hotel industry.
That’s exactly why we created the Hotel Sustainability Index (HSI): to bring clarity, transparency, and simplicity to hotel sustainability measurement for both travel programs and their travelers. The HSI supports sustainability from multiple angles:
- Hotel sourcing and RFPs, helping travel managers build a more responsible hotel program strategy
- Reporting and analytics, including CO₂ emissions and water consumption insights
- And eventually, traveler decision-making during booking
What traditional hotel sustainability metrics miss
While hotels are often labeled as representing only “10% of total travel emissions,” that number barely scratches the surface of their true environmental impact. Two important factors should change how we think about hotel sustainability:
- That 10% is only an average and can vary dramatically by destination: Hotel emissions can differ by a factor of 20 depending on the carbon intensity of a country’s electricity grid. If your travelers frequent regions powered largely by fossil fuels, such as China, India, or Australia, the hotel portion of your corporate travel emissions will be significantly higher than the global average suggests.
- Emissions are only one piece of a much larger sustainability picture: A hotel’s environmental footprint goes far beyond just carbon emissions. Energy consumption, single-use plastics, waste management, vegetarian food availability, and especially water consumption can have a major environmental impact. In some luxury properties, particularly in parts of the Middle East and Asia, water usage can reach several thousand liters per guest per day.
To make meaningful progress, business travel programs need visibility into all elements of a hotel’s footprint, not just emissions alone. That’s exactly the gap the HSI is designed to fill.
Assessing the true environmental impact of your hotels
The Hotel Sustainability Index evaluates every hotel on a 100-point scale, based on six key pillars:
- CO2 emissions: in kg per night per guest, calculated according to the Hotel Carbon Measurement Index (HCMI) methodology.
- Water consumption: in liters per night per guest, calculated according to the Hotel Water Measurement Index (HWMI) methodology.
- Energy consumption: This is distinct from carbon emissions. A hotel can have high energy consumption despite low emissions (for example, if using “clean” electricity).
- Eco-certifications: With different scores based on the based on the rigor, transparency, and credibility of each certification.
- Other sustainability initiatives: Including single-use plastic policy, waste management, vegetarian options, etc.
- Transparency: Rewarding hotels that openly provide their environmental data.
Most of the data powering the HSI comes directly from hotel chains and individual properties. In cases where a hotel hasn’t provided data, we use our industry recognized GATE4 methodology, though these hotels typically receive lower scores due to reduced transparency.
Across all sources, Advito consolidates and validates data from tens of thousands of properties worldwide, ensuring broad global hotel coverage for corporate travel programs.
Spotlighting the best: the “Greener Choice” classification
To make sustainable decision making simple, the Hotel Sustainability Index includes a “Greener Choice” classification for hotels that score in the top tier of sustainability performance within their local market. This helps travelers quickly understand which properties in a specific city or region are operating with the strongest environmental performance.
Because sustainability varies widely by location, from electricity grids to water scarcity to waste management infrastructure, it wouldn’t make sense to compare a hotel in California directly with one in India or the Middle East. That’s why the index takes into account both absolute and relative performance. This means we assess how a property compares to global benchmarks and how it stacks up against similar hotels in the same city.
So, while a hotel with a score of 70 in New Delhi will likely be a “Greener Choice,” the top choice in San Francisco would have a very different score. Ultimately, only 2-4% of hotels per city earn the “Greener Choice” label, ensuring meaningful differentiation.
What travelers will see during booking
We’re currently rolling out the Hotel Sustainability Index across booking tools such as Concur, TripSource, and Cytric. As this functionality goes live, travelers will be able to access key insights at the point of booking including:
- The hotel’s HSI score out of 100
- The Greener Choice badge, when applicable
We intentionally chose not to display raw carbon footprint or water consumption numbers. These figures sometimes vary only slightly across properties making it difficult for a traveler to quickly make a distinction. Instead, the index provides a clearer, more holistic snapshot, allowing travelers to quickly identify the most sustainable options.
A clear path to more responsible corporate hotel strategy
As sustainability expectations continue to rise, corporate travel programs need tools that make responsible decisions simpler, more consistent, and more transparent. The Hotel Sustainability Index brings together the data that has long been missing from the hotel category and translates it into insights that travelers and travel managers can actually use.
By evaluating environmental impact holistically, the HSI makes it easier to design smarter hotel programs, guide travelers toward better choices, and ultimately reduce the environmental footprint of business travel. With this new level of clarity, sustainability in the hotel space becomes not just measurable, but actionable. Reach out to our team today to learn how the Hotel Sustainability Index can support your corporate travel program.