The hotel website shows a sun-dappled terrace, a bamboo straw, and a tasteful sans-serif promise: committed to a sustainable future. Lovely. But what does it actually mean? Probably the towels. Possibly nothing. Reading a green travel claim well is a skill — closer to reading a nutrition label than reading a brochure — and once you've got the knack, you can spot the difference between a hotel that's done the work and a hotel that's done the marketing in roughly the time it takes to brew a coffee.
Start with the verb, not the vibe
Sustainable travel copy lives or dies on its verbs. "Committed to," "passionate about," "on a journey towards," and "believes in" are aspirational verbs. They describe feelings, not actions. An auditor's eye glides past them and looks for the active, measurable ones: reduced, eliminated, replaced, certified, audited, offset, sourced, measured, reported.
Try this on the next hotel page you read. Highlight every verb in the sustainability section. If 80% of them describe intentions and 20% describe actions, you're looking at a vibe, not a programme. The ratio you want is the other way round.
The same trick works for the shop tab on any travel brand. "We care about the planet" is a feeling. "Our cotton is GOTS-certified and our packaging is FSC-certified recycled fibre" is a fact you can verify in about ninety seconds.
Demand a noun after every adjective
"Eco-friendly," "green," "ethical," "natural," "responsible," and "conscious" are adjectives doing the heavy lifting in greenwashing. They're not regulated. Anyone can use them about anything. The fix is simple: when you see one, ask eco-friendly compared to what? and responsible according to whom?
A claim that survives this test will name a benchmark or a standard. "Lower-carbon than our 2019 baseline, verified by [named third party]" is a claim. "Eco-conscious property" is a mood board. If the noun after the adjective is missing, the adjective is decoration.
Look for the boring documents
Real sustainability work generates paperwork. Boring, unglamorous, often badly designed paperwork. When you're trying to verify a travel claim, the unsexy documents are the gold:
- An ESG or sustainability report — ideally published annually, with figures from the previous year and the year before that, so you can see direction of travel.
- Third-party certification logos linked to the certifier's own database, where you can search the property and confirm the certificate is current.
- A scope-defined carbon disclosure — does the figure cover only the building's energy (Scope 1 and 2) or also the supply chain, laundry, food, and guest travel (Scope 3)? The answer changes the number by an order of magnitude.
- A water and waste statement with absolute numbers, not just percentages.
If a hotel can't produce any of these and instead points you to a single page with a leaf icon, you have your answer. Auditing isn't an attitude; it's a paper trail.
Decode the certifications (most are real, some are wallpaper)
Certifications are useful precisely because they outsource the auditing to someone whose job it is to be sceptical. But not all schemes are equal. As a rough hierarchy:
- Independent, audited, ISO-aligned schemes with on-site inspections and public criteria. These tend to be recognised by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), which itself doesn't certify hotels but accredits the bodies that do. A GSTC-recognised certification is a strong signal.
- National or regional eco-label schemes with published criteria and renewal cycles. Useful, though varying in rigour.
- Industry-association memberships — these often involve a fee and a pledge but no on-site audit. Not worthless, but not proof of practice.
- Self-declared badges created by the brand itself. These are marketing assets, not certifications. Treat accordingly.
The litmus test: can you find the certifier's website, the criteria the property had to meet, and a database entry confirming the property's current status? If yes, the badge is real. If the badge only exists on the hotel's own website, you're looking at branding.
Read the carbon claim like a forensic accountant
Carbon is where the most sophisticated greenwashing lives, because the numbers are large, abstract, and invisible. A few questions cut through almost all of it:
What scope does the claim cover? "Carbon-neutral" applied only to a property's electricity bill is not the same as carbon-neutral applied to the full guest stay. The latter includes laundry, food, staff commute, and a slice of the building's embodied emissions. Most claims quietly cover the first and imply the second.
Is it reduction, avoidance, or offset? Reduction means actually emitting less than before. Avoidance means a project somewhere prevented emissions that would otherwise have happened. Offset means paying for removal or avoidance to balance what you still emit. All three are legitimate; conflating them is not. A credible operator tells you the split.
Where does the offset come from, and is it on a registry? Quality offsets are issued by registries — Verra, Gold Standard, Climate Action Reserve, American Carbon Registry, and a small number of others — and each retired credit has a unique serial number. If a brand says "we offset our footprint" but can't tell you the registry, the project, or the vintage, that's not an offset programme; that's a slogan.
Is the credit retired? A credit only counts once it's retired (taken permanently out of circulation in the registry). Until then, it's just been bought, and could in theory be resold or double-counted.
Spot the four classic dodges
Even good operators occasionally slip into these. They're worth memorising.
The selective scope
"100% renewable electricity." Good — but electricity is often a small fraction of a hotel's total emissions, dwarfed by gas heating, food, and supply chain. The claim is true and incomplete at the same time.
The future tense
"We will be net-zero by [some distant year]." A target without a published interim plan, baseline year, and annual reporting is a press release. Ask for the milestones.
The hidden denominator
"We've reduced emissions by 40%." Per what? Per guest-night? Per square metre? In absolute terms? Intensity metrics can fall while absolute emissions rise, simply because the business has grown. Always ask for the absolute number too.
The unit swap
"We saved enough water to fill X swimming pools." Charming. Meaningless. You want litres, kilowatt-hours, kilogrammes, and tonnes of CO₂e — units you can compare across properties.
Test the supply chain, not just the lobby
The most authentic green hotels tend to be boring about the things you'll never see. Where does the soap come from? Is the laundry done on-site or trucked? Where do the eggs come from, and the bedlinen, and the cleaning chemicals? Is staff turnover low and pay above the local market — because labour conditions are part of sustainability too?
You can usually surface this with one or two emails. A property with a real programme will answer specifically and proudly. A property with a marketing programme will answer in adjectives.
Apply the same lens to what you buy on the road
The audit instinct doesn't switch off when you leave the hotel. The reusable bottle, the linen shirt, the "ocean-bound plastic" sunglasses — every product makes a claim, and most of those claims rest on the same handful of moves: a vague adjective, a missing scope, a self-issued badge, a fuzzy denominator.
Quick checklist for travel-shop purchases:
- Is the material certified by an independent body, with a code or batch you can look up?
- Does the brand publish where the product is made, not just where it's designed?
- Is there an end-of-life answer — repair, take-back, recycling — or does sustainability stop at checkout?
- Are the carbon and water claims absolute and dated, or relative and timeless?
You don't need to become a full-time auditor. You need to ask the questions long enough that brands feel them, and budget for them, and bake the answers into the next product.
Keep the bar high without burning out
Auditing every booking is exhausting and unnecessary. The point of these habits isn't to turn travel into homework; it's to build a quick filter so you can relax once a property or a product clears it. Spend ten focused minutes on a hotel before you book and you'll know more than 90% of guests do. Spend two minutes scanning a product page and you'll dodge most of the noise.
And reward the operators who do the work. The fastest way to push the industry forward is to give your money to the people who can answer the awkward questions, and to ask the awkward questions of the ones who can't yet.
That filter is part of why IMPT exists. Every hotel booking through the platform comes with a tonne of CO₂ offset on-chain — registry-issued, transparently retired, paid from our commission rather than added to your bill — so the carbon piece is verifiable rather than vibey. The shop applies the same lens to brands; the IMPT Card extends it to everyday spend; and the IMPT Token rewards the climate behaviour you were already doing. Audit the rest of the world by all means. We'd rather you didn't have to audit us.