LONDON—The International Tourism Partnership (ITP) and Greenview have launched the free Hotel Footprinting Tool which allows anyone easy access to the carbon and energy footprint of hotels worldwide. The Hotel Footprinting Tool uses data from the annual Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Study.
It’s now far easier for hotels to compare their own carbon footprint to industry averages in their locality. Businesses seeking to map the footprint of their own hotel stays and meetings can now access more accurate figures for hotels in the area and market segment, rather than using broad industry averages or having to contact individual hotels for information. The footprint report function enables businesses and event organizers to create and download reports for reporting of their scope 3 business travel emissions, or to offset those emissions.
Hotel Footprinting data is compliant with the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative (HCMI) methodology, developed by ITP, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and a working group of 23 global hotel companies which created a universally recognized methodology for measuring and recording carbon outputs in hotels. Information on the water footprint of hotels will be available from 2017, following the launch of ITP’s Hotel Water Measurement Initiative in September 2016.
Easy Access to Benchmarking Information
Fran Hughes, Director of ITP says, “The number one question from users of HCMI is, ‘How can I benchmark my carbon footprint?’ Now hoteliers around the world can easily access that information. We hope that the Hotel Footprinting Tool will accelerate learning and drive action on emissions reduction, and encourage more businesses to calculate and report on their business travel carbon footprint.”
Eric Ricaurte, Founder and CEO of Greenview, says, “Through collaboration with industry leaders this past decade, we finally arrived at a global data set for the hotel industry. In launching the Hotel Footprinting Tool we provide this information to the entire industry to ease calculations, encourage improvement, and understand the industry’s impact globally and locally.”
In the longer term ITP and Greenview will advance the Footprinting Tool to help hotels drive down their own energy use and carbon emissions against the local average and continue to reduce outputs overall. Additionally the information could be incorporated onto online booking engines allowing people to see the carbon footprint of their stay at the point of booking.
The Hotel Footprinting Tool can be accessed at www.hotelfootprints.org.
