A group of 23 international hotel chains including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and InterContinental have agreed a standard for calculating the carbon footprint of a hotel stay.

The International Tourism Partnership (ITP) and the World Travel Tourism Council (WTTC) got together last year to develop a unified methodology for measuring and reporting carbon emissions across the industry.

The variation in approaches was leading to confusion among customers wanting to monitor and reduce their own carbon footprints, say the developers.

The new methodology, the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative or HCMI 1.0, has now been tested across the board from boutique hotels to resorts and major conference hotels, and reviewed by consultants KPMG and the World Resources Institute.

The standard allows guests to measure the carbon footprint of stays in hotels, which can feed into their own carbon accounting efforts and will ultimately enable the availability of carbon-offsetting services.

The ITP and WTTC working group that developed the standard say they will continue to fine-tune the methodology over the next year, while it encourages roll-out across the industry.

“Through this initiative we have seen major hotel companies come together to agree a means of communicating carbon impacts which ultimately will result in more transparency and clarity for the consumer,” says David Scowsill, president and CEO of WTTC. “We expect this industry common language to be widely used within the next two years.”

Accor, which owns the Sofitel and Adagio chains, has already launched an interactive tool for conference organisers to calculate the carbon footprint of hosted events.

For further information:
www.wttc.org/activities/environment/hotel-carbon-measurement-initiative/

Article source: http://www.energyefficiencynews.com/i/5197/