Accommodation

Making more informed travel choices should be easy. But faced with inconsistent, confusing, – or simply a lack of – information, it’s often anything but. At Travalyst, we’re tackling this challenge head-on in the accommodation sector.

From global chains to boutique hotels to short-term rentals, the accommodation landscape is incredibly diverse. Sustainability practices and knowledge vary widely, as does operators’ capacity to collect and share this information with travellers. The nature of the sector also means that its footprint is extremely complicated – incorporating energy usage, water consumption, waste management, biodiversity, community impact, and more. Assessing the overall sustainability of accommodation providers is complex, and communicating this clearly to travellers is even more difficult.

Research has shown that travellers care about sustainability, with 83%
of travellers saying that sustainable travel is important to them¹. However, we’ve found that 63% of travellers do not want to spend time researching sustainability when booking their travel².

That’s why we’re committed to providing easily accessible, trustworthy information that’s integrated directly into the booking process, empowering everyone to make more informed choices wherever they choose to book.

₁ _Booking.com
₂ _{Source: Travalyst survey; conducted August 2024 of 2,000 UK adults who have flown when travelling abroad}

Improving access to sustainability information for accommodation: live initiatives

Supporting certification schemes and stakeholders with regulatory alignment

Sustainability certifications can help accommodation providers assess how their actions impact both people and the planet — and signal to travellers that they take this impact seriously. However, there are a wide range of approaches to sustainability certification, while new regulation is applying pressure and reshaping expectations placed on sustainability labels.

Our certifications initiative supports all certifications stakeholders in preparing for incoming regulation by providing a mechanism for schemes to confidently declare their compliance, and offering industry-wide visibility into which schemes are aligned through our website and eventually through our open-access Data Hub.

This initiative is creating clarity across the certifications landscape, and aims to establish a single, consistent, minimum threshold for certification schemes across regions and markets; reducing fragmentation and improving comparability.

Learn more about our certifications initiative.

Creating a central hub for sustainability data

Travellers’ ability to identify and book more sustainable options is hampered by the fact that there is no single, reliable source for data that consistently measures environmental, social, and economic impact — and then distributes that information in a way that makes it easily accessible.

We’ve created a platform to unlock sustainability data, at scale. A centrailsed place for travel and tourism operators and data providers to share their impact data, once, serving a range of industry use cases; from sharing information with travellers, to reporting, analytics or industry innovation.

This version processes data for the accommodation sector, but soon this will expand across other key areas of travel, including rail and other sector verticals.

While developing the Data Hub, we leveraged our acquisition of Weeva, a sustainability-management platform created specifically for accommodation providers. The intellectual property and functionality we acquired was repurposed to enable development of this platform; providing sustainability data, open-source, at scale.

Watch back our first Data Hub information exchange webinar.

Sustainability information for accommodation: what we’ve achieved so far

Giving travellers access to comprehensive sustainability information for hotels and vacation rentals, for the first time

Spearheaded by Booking.com, we worked with our partners and industry organisations to select over 60 attributes that could be used to assess each property’s sustainability efforts across five categories:

Energy
Waste
Water
Biodiversity & ecosystems
Destination & community

These attributes were validated by our Independent Advisory Group, and our partners then collected information about these sustainability efforts directly from accommodation providers. This information was then shared with travellers on their platforms, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

Three of the leading accommodation booking platforms – Booking.com, Expedia, and Google – adopted this approach. The result? Millions of valuable data points shared with travellers worldwide.

Stay up to date on our accommodation initiatives

Our Certifications initiative and Data Hub are evolving fast and we’re consulting with the industry and experts at every stage of the process. To receive updates on our progress and invitations to webinars, please sign up to receive our newsletter below.