Walk into almost any hotel lobby on the planet and you'll find a small placard near the lifts asking you to reuse your towels for the planet. Walk into the same hotel's website and you'll find a "sustainability" page with a wind turbine on it. Walk into the back-of-house and you'll often find a single overworked operations manager who has been told to "do the green stuff" alongside their actual job. The gap between the lobby placard and what's actually being measured is where most hotel sustainability claims quietly collapse — and why a proper hotel sustainability audit tends to surface a very different building from the one in the brochure.
This isn't a piece about catching anyone out. Plenty of hotels are genuinely trying. It's a piece about why "trying" and "verifiable" are not the same thing, and what a traveller can reasonably look for before they book.
The towel card is doing a lot of heavy lifting
The reuse-your-towel programme is the most famous piece of hotel environmentalism on Earth, and it's also the most misleading. The card itself isn't the problem — reusing linen genuinely saves water, energy and detergent. The problem is what the card has come to represent: a way for an entire property to feel like it's done its bit, while the rooftop HVAC plant runs at a setpoint nobody has reviewed since the building opened, the kitchen sends edible food to landfill nightly, and the procurement team buys whatever toiletries the parent group negotiated centrally.
If the most visible green action in a hotel is something the guest is asked to do, that's usually a sign that the property hasn't yet done the harder structural work. It's a tell. A genuinely well-run sustainable hotel tends to talk about its own systems — chillers, kitchens, contracts — before it talks about your towels.
What "ESG" actually means in a hotel, and what it doesn't
The phrase ESG hotel gets used as if it were a certification. It isn't. ESG is a reporting framework — environmental, social and governance disclosures — and at the corporate level, large hotel groups produce annual reports full of charts. That's fine and useful. But there are two important things travellers should know.
First: a group-level ESG report tells you about the average across hundreds of properties. The flagship in Copenhagen and the franchised airport hotel in a different country are reported as one number. The number is not the building you're sleeping in.
Second: ESG reporting is mostly about disclosure, not performance. A hotel can publish that its emissions went up and still tick the ESG box, because the box is "did you report it?" rather than "did you reduce it?" Travellers reading ESG language often assume the second; the document only promises the first.
The three numbers that quietly decide everything
If you stripped a hotel's environmental footprint down to what actually matters operationally, you'd land on three things: energy use per occupied room, water use per occupied room, and waste-to-landfill per occupied room. These are the metrics that serious sustainability managers track weekly. They are also the metrics that almost never appear on a hotel's public-facing sustainability page.
Why not? Partly because they're embarrassing if you haven't been investing. Partly because there's no single agreed reporting standard a guest can compare across brands. And partly because telling a holidaymaker "our energy use intensity is X kWh per occupied room" sounds less appealing than a photo of a beehive on the roof.
But the absence of these numbers is itself information. A hotel that proudly publishes its energy and water intensity, and shows the trend year-on-year, is operating differently from one that publishes a stock image of a forest.
Carbon-neutral, net-zero, climate-positive: the words have lost their grip
Marketing departments adopted these terms faster than auditors could define them. A few useful distinctions:
- Carbon-neutral usually means the hotel calculated some portion of its emissions and bought offsets to match. The two interesting questions are which emissions (often only the easy ones — Scope 1 and 2, not the supply chain) and which offsets (some are excellent, some have been shown to overstate their impact dramatically).
- Net-zero implies a target of reducing emissions to as close to zero as possible, with only residual emissions offset. In hotel marketing, it's frequently used as a synonym for "carbon-neutral," which it isn't.
- Climate-positive or carbon-positive means going beyond neutrality. Done well, it's powerful. Done badly, it's the same offset-purchasing exercise with a more confident adjective.
The fact-check that breaks most claims isn't even technical. It's: "Show me the methodology, the boundary, and the registry where the offsets are retired." A hotel that can answer all three has done the work. Most can answer none.
The certification jungle
There are dozens of hotel sustainability certifications. Some are rigorous third-party audits with site visits and ongoing monitoring. Some are essentially self-assessment questionnaires the hotel filled in itself. Some are paid-for badges with very light verification. They all sit on the same wall behind reception, in similar-looking frames.
A few signals that a certification is doing real work:
- An independent auditor visits the property — not just reviews documents.
- Re-certification is required on a defined cycle, not granted in perpetuity.
- The criteria are public, and you can read what the hotel was actually assessed against.
- The certifying body publishes which hotels have lost certification, not just which have gained it.
If you can't tell from the website which type of certification a hotel holds, default to scepticism. The serious schemes make their methodology easy to find because they want it scrutinised.
Where the real footprint hides: the supply chain
For most hotels, the largest share of emissions doesn't come from the building. It comes from everything bought to fill the building — food, linen, furniture, amenity kits, cleaning products, the laundry service down the road, the construction works during the last refurbishment. This is Scope 3, and it is genuinely difficult to measure.
It's also where green hotel claim language gets thinnest. "Locally sourced" can mean one menu item. "Sustainable suppliers" can mean the supplier has its own marketing page. "Eliminated single-use plastics" often means the bathroom amenities switched to refillable dispensers while the breakfast buffet still hands out individually wrapped butter.
The honest version of supply-chain sustainability in a hotel is slow, unglamorous and contractual. It looks like rewriting procurement standards, auditing laundry partners, and renegotiating with food distributors. It doesn't photograph well. Which is precisely why it's underdone.
What a credible audit actually checks
If you imagine yourself as the auditor walking in cold, the questions that separate a real programme from a brochure are surprisingly mundane:
- What is the energy intensity per occupied room, and how has it trended over the last three years?
- What percentage of electricity is from renewable sources, and is that from on-site generation, a verified power purchase agreement, or unbundled certificates? (The three are not equivalent.)
- Where does food waste go? Is it weighed? Is the kitchen on a reduction programme with targets?
- What's the linen and laundry contract, and where is the laundry physically done?
- Who, by name, owns sustainability inside the property — and how senior are they?
- If the hotel claims to be carbon-neutral, where is the calculation methodology and where are the offsets registered?
None of these questions require technical expertise to ask. They require a hotel to have done its homework. Most haven't, yet — and that's the real state of the industry, beneath the lobby messaging.
What this means for the traveller actually trying
It would be easy to read all this and conclude that nothing claimed by any hotel can be trusted. That's too cynical. The more useful conclusion is that the industry is at an awkward middle stage: the language has run ahead of the practice, but the practice is genuinely catching up in the properties that care. Travellers can help by rewarding the ones that publish hard numbers, name their methodologies, and resist the temptation to plant a beehive instead of replacing the boiler.
Look for specifics. Look for trends, not single-year claims. Look for the awkward, technical sentences on the sustainability page rather than the cinematic ones. And accept that the most rigorous hotels often sound the most modest, because they know what's still left to fix.
This is roughly why IMPT was built the way it was. Rather than ask travellers to police every claim themselves, every booking through our platform funds a tonne of CO₂ offset on-chain — paid from our commission, not added to your bill — with the retirement publicly verifiable. The hotels you see span 1.7 million properties across 195 countries, sustainable specialists and ordinary city stays alike, because the climate maths shouldn't depend on whether a property has won the marketing war. Pair that with the IMPT Shop, the IMPT Card and the Token if you want the impact to compound across how you travel and spend — and treat the lobby placard, fondly, as exactly what it is: a small, well-meaning start.