"Eco-friendly" on a hotel website does roughly the same job as "artisan" on a sandwich label — it sounds lovely, it costs nothing to print, and it tells you almost nothing about what you're actually getting. A property can call itself green because it asks you to reuse your towel. It can also call itself green because it has rebuilt its energy system, sources food from within fifty miles, treats its own wastewater, and pays its housekeepers a living wage. Same word. Wildly different reality. The good news: you don't need a sustainability degree to tell them apart. You need about six questions and a willingness to send an email before you book.
Why the marketing copy is almost always useless
Hotel websites are written by marketing teams, and marketing teams are trained to translate any operational decision — however small — into the most flattering possible language. A hotel that swapped its plastic shampoo bottles for refillable dispensers will write about its "commitment to a plastic-free future." A hotel that installed a single bank of solar panels will write about being "powered by the sun." Neither claim is a lie, exactly. But neither tells you whether the building runs on fossil gas, whether the staff are paid properly, or whether the "locally sourced" breakfast buffet was trucked in from the same wholesaler every other hotel in town uses.
The fix isn't cynicism. It's specificity. Vague claims dissolve under specific questions. Real sustainability programmes survive them, because the people running them are usually delighted that someone finally asked.
Question one: "Are you certified, and by whom?"
Certification isn't a perfect signal — some schemes are stricter than others — but it is the single fastest way to separate hotels that have done the work from hotels that have done the leaflet. Look for names recognised by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), which is the closest thing the industry has to a standards body. Schemes like Green Key, EarthCheck, Green Globe, LEED (for the building itself), and BREEAM all require independent verification of specific criteria. EU Ecolabel is another credible mark for properties in Europe.
What you want to hear back: the name of the certification, the year it was awarded, and ideally a link to the public listing. What you don't want to hear: "We follow sustainable practices internally" or "We're working towards certification." That's the hospitality equivalent of "the cheque is in the post."
Question two: "Where does your electricity come from?"
This is the question that separates serious hotels from cosmetic ones, because energy is where most of a hotel's carbon footprint actually sits. Heating, cooling, hot water, lifts, kitchens — that's the real number. Towel reuse is rounding error.
Listen for the specifics:
- On-site generation. Solar panels, ground-source heat pumps, biomass boilers. Ask roughly what share of demand they cover.
- Grid mix. Some countries have very clean grids (Iceland, Norway, France). Some don't. A hotel can't change its national grid, but it can be honest about it.
- Renewable tariffs. Are they buying certified renewable electricity, or are they relying on unbundled certificates that critics consider weak?
- Gas. If the kitchen and the boilers run on gas, ask whether they have a transition plan. "We're electrifying by [year]" is a real answer. Silence is also an answer.
You don't need to interrogate. A polite "I'm curious how the building is powered" usually opens the door.
Question three: "What happens to the food, the linen, and the waste?"
Hotels generate a startling amount of waste, and how they manage it tells you a lot. The questions to ask are unglamorous but revealing.
- Food. Where is breakfast sourced? Is there a written policy on local or seasonal procurement? What happens to leftovers — composted, donated, binned? Buffet-heavy hotels tend to waste enormous quantities of food unless they actively manage it.
- Linen and amenities. Refillable dispensers in bathrooms, or single-use miniatures? In-house laundry with efficient machines, or trucked out daily? Are the toiletries from a brand with verifiable claims, or unbranded "natural" stickers?
- Waste streams. How many separations does the hotel run? Glass, paper, organic, plastic, general — or is it all one bin behind the kitchen?
If the front-desk team can answer these without checking, the programme is real. If they can't, it might still be real, but someone is hoarding the information.
Question four: "How are the people who work here treated?"
Sustainability is not just carbon. The "S" in ESG is people, and a hotel that exploits its housekeeping staff is not a sustainable hotel, no matter how many solar panels are on the roof. This is the question most travellers feel awkward asking, which is exactly why it matters.
You can ask it gently. Try: "Is the hotel staff directly employed, or contracted out?" Outsourced housekeeping is often where labour conditions deteriorate. Or: "Does the hotel pay a living wage as defined locally?" Some certifications now include labour standards; B Corp certification, where it appears in hospitality, takes them seriously. Family-run and independent hotels often have the easiest, most direct answers here. Big chains can have very good policies — and very uneven implementation between properties.
Question five: "What does your sustainability report say?"
Hotels that take this seriously publish reports. They don't need to be glossy. A two-page PDF with actual numbers — energy use per room-night, water consumption, waste diverted from landfill, year-on-year change — is worth more than a hundred pages of stock photography and the word "passion."
If a hotel can send you a document with measured data, you're dealing with people who measure. If they send you a brochure with smiling guests on a beach, you're dealing with people who market. The first group is rarer than it should be, but it exists at every price point, from city hostels to country-house hotels.
One useful follow-up: "What's the thing you're worst at?" An honest sustainability lead will have an answer. Greenwashing operations almost never do, because admitting weakness isn't in the script.
Question six: "What does a guest actually do differently here?"
This question flushes out whether the hotel's programme is operational or decorative. A property that has genuinely thought about sustainability will have small, concrete answers. Maybe the room key controls the power, so the lights and air conditioning shut off when you leave. Maybe the minibar is stocked from local producers and the list tells you who they are. Maybe there's a refill station for water bottles on every floor. Maybe the breakfast menu changes weekly because it follows what's actually in season.
Decorative programmes, by contrast, ask the guest to perform sustainability — hang up your towel, reuse your sheets, tick a box at check-in — without changing anything about how the hotel runs. That's not nothing. But it's not enough to justify the marketing.
Red flags worth taking seriously
A short list of things that should make you slow down before booking:
- "Eco-luxury" with no specifics. Two words doing a lot of heavy lifting and very little measurement.
- Self-designed eco-labels. A logo invented by the hotel group itself, with no external auditor, no public criteria, and no expiry date.
- Carbon neutrality claims with no methodology. Ask what they measured, what they reduced, and what they offset. If "offset" is doing all the work, that's a flag in itself.
- Heavy emphasis on guest behaviour, light emphasis on building operations. If their entire programme is about what you should do, ask what they do.
- Gleaming new resorts in fragile environments. Mangroves, reefs, deserts, alpine meadows. A truly sustainable build in such places is possible but rare; a "sustainable" badge on a recently bulldozed coastline deserves scrutiny.
What good looks like, in plain language
You're looking for a hotel where the sustainability story is boring. Boring is good. Boring means: we measure these five things, we're improving them at this pace, here's the certification, here's the report, here's the person whose job it is, and here are the things we haven't fixed yet. Boring is what survives a journalist's call. Glossy doesn't.
You're also looking for a hotel that doesn't make you the project manager of its conscience. Yes, you should reuse the towel. But the building should be doing more than you are.
Where IMPT comes in
You can use these questions on any booking platform, ours included. IMPT lists 1.7 million hotels across 195 countries — which means the same range of greenwash-to-genuine you'll find anywhere — and every booking automatically retires one tonne of verified, on-chain carbon credits, paid from our commission rather than added to your bill. That offset isn't a substitute for staying somewhere that runs cleanly in the first place; it's a backstop for the footprint that even the best hotel still has. Ask the six questions, pick the hotel that answers them properly, book it through a platform that's putting its own money into the climate maths, and use the IMPT shop or Card for the rest of the trip. That's roughly the whole job.