Why a green leaf on the website tells you almost nothing
Walk into any hotel lobby and you'll find evidence of environmental ambition: a card on the bed asking you to reuse your towel, a refillable amenity bottle in the shower, perhaps a small plaque near reception announcing membership of a sustainability scheme. None of this is bad. Some of it is genuinely useful. But none of it, on its own, tells you whether the hotel is actually running a sustainability programme or simply marketing one. The difference matters — to guests who care, to corporate travel buyers under pressure to report properly, and to platforms like ours that have to decide which properties deserve the label. The good news: you can usually tell within five questions. Here they are.
Question 1: "What did you measure last year, and what changed?"
Real sustainability programmes have numbers attached. Not glossy brochure numbers — operational numbers. Energy use per occupied room. Water use per guest night. Waste sent to landfill versus recycled or composted. Carbon emissions broken down by scope. The figures themselves don't have to be perfect. What matters is that someone at the hotel can produce them, explain how they were collected, and show last year's number alongside this year's.
If the answer is a slow blink, or a polite redirection to "our group sustainability report," that's a tell. Group reports are aggregated to the point of uselessness for any individual property. A hotel that's actually managing its impact knows its own meter readings.
Follow-up: ask what got worse. A team that can only tell you what improved is either lucky or selectively reporting. Real operators will admit that, say, water use crept up after they reopened the spa, or that food waste rose with banquet bookings. Honesty about regressions is the single best signal that the rest of the data is real.
Question 2: "Who owns this — and do they have a budget?"
There's a useful test for any hotel sustainability programme: find the person responsible, and find out what they can spend without asking permission.
If sustainability is bolted onto the marketing director's job, the programme will produce campaigns. If it sits with the chief engineer, you'll get boiler upgrades and LED retrofits. If it sits with the general manager and they have actual capital authority, you'll get structural change. If it sits nowhere — distributed across "everyone's responsibility" — you'll get nothing measurable.
The budget question is the one most hotels duck. A sustainability lead with no budget is a press officer with a different title. A sustainability lead with a capex line for efficiency projects, an opex line for staff training, and the authority to override a procurement decision when the cheaper option is the dirtier one — that's a programme.
You don't need them to share figures. You just need to hear that the structure exists.
Question 3: "Show me the supplier list"
This one separates the serious from the performative faster than any other. Hotels are, fundamentally, procurement operations. They buy food, linen, cleaning chemicals, energy, furniture, paper, toiletries, coffee, and several thousand other things. The environmental footprint of a hotel is largely the environmental footprint of what it buys.
So: who supplies the kitchen? Are produce miles tracked or even discussed? Is fish sourced against a credible standard? Is the laundry contract with a provider that uses ozone or low-temperature systems, or is it whoever bid lowest? Is the energy contract a genuine renewable tariff, or unbundled certificates that allow any supplier to look green on paper?
You're not going to audit this from a guest seat. But asking — particularly at corporate negotiation stage — produces revealing answers. Hotels that have done the work will walk you through it almost gratefully, because nobody usually asks. Hotels that haven't will pivot to talking about the recycling bins in the back of house.
The laundry test
If you only have time for one supplier question, ask about laundry. It's typically one of the largest single sources of water, energy and chemical use on a hotel's bill, and it's almost always outsourced, which means it's almost always invisible on the hotel's own reports unless someone deliberately pulled it in. A hotel that can talk about its laundry's environmental performance has done the unglamorous work.
Question 4: "What does staff training look like — and what happens when someone gets it wrong?"
Sustainability that lives only in the policy document dies in the corridor at 11pm when a tired housekeeper has to choose between the slow-correct way and the fast-easy way. Programmes that work are programmes that have been trained into the muscle memory of the people doing the actual work.
Useful things to ask:
- How often does sustainability appear in onboarding for new staff?
- Is there ongoing training, or was it one slideshow in 2019?
- Are housekeepers, kitchen staff and engineering trained differently for their actual roles?
- Is there a feedback channel where staff can flag waste they're seeing — and does anything happen with it?
- What's the consequence when a department misses a target? Is it discussed at the management meeting, or quietly forgotten?
The last point is the giveaway. Targets without consequences are aspirations. A programme that reviews performance monthly, names departments that are off-track and adjusts plans accordingly is operating, not marketing.
Question 5: "What are you choosing not to do?"
This is the question almost no one asks, and it's the most diagnostic of the five.
Genuine sustainability programmes involve trade-offs. Bottled water is profitable; replacing it with filtered carafes costs revenue. Long banquet menus reduce food waste poorly; tighter menus annoy event planners. Offering daily linen change is the industry default; opting out by default and offering it on request is a small revenue and operational nudge against your own brand standard. Heating an outdoor pool to 28°C in November pleases guests; not heating it to 28°C in November pleases the planet and saves on the gas bill.
Hotels that are seriously managing their impact have made decisions that cost them something. They've turned down certain group bookings. They've stopped serving certain ingredients. They've removed amenities that guests sometimes complain about. They've said no to a renovation spec because the cheaper option was also the higher-emissions one over the building's lifetime.
If a hotel cannot name a single thing it has chosen not to do — a single trade-off, a single compromise, a single revenue line it has voluntarily reduced — then the programme is, by definition, friction-free. And friction-free sustainability is decoration.
What this looks like for travellers (and why it's harder than it should be)
You are not, of course, going to phone the duty manager and run a five-question audit before booking a city break. The honest reality is that individual travellers can't do due diligence at the depth corporate buyers can. What you can do is read the signals.
Specifics over slogans. A hotel that tells you exactly which local farms it sources from is doing more than a hotel that says "we love local." A hotel that publishes its energy intensity figure, however imperfect, is doing more than one that puts a leaf icon next to its room rates. A hotel that explains its housekeeping policy in two sentences on its website is doing more than one with a sustainability page full of stock imagery.
Look for the boring stuff. Boilers, building management systems, heat recovery, grey water, ground-source heat pumps, kitchen waste tracking. Anything that sounds like an engineering problem rather than a press release. Hotels that talk about engineering are usually doing engineering.
And forgive imperfection. The hotel admitting it still has work to do on Scope 3 emissions is more credible than the one announcing it solved climate change last quarter.
Why platforms have to ask these questions too
The honest version of this article is that the booking platform sits in the same position as the traveller, only with more leverage. We can't run a five-question audit on every property in a 1.7-million-hotel inventory. Nobody can. But we can decide that a booking should carry a verifiable climate action — a tonne of CO₂ offset on-chain — regardless of what the hotel itself is doing, so that the climate cost of the trip is not solely dependent on the property's marketing department being honest.
That's the bit that sits underneath every IMPT booking: the offset is paid from our commission, recorded on-chain, and doesn't ask the traveller to take anything on trust. Combine that with the IMPT Shop for everyday spending with sustainability-minded brands, the IMPT Card for using rewards on real purchases, and the IMPT Token as the loyalty layer that ties it together, and you've got a way to keep travelling and shopping without outsourcing the entire question of impact to whoever wrote the hotel's website copy. Ask the five questions when you can. When you can't, at least know your booking still did something.