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

Promoting credible sustainability certifications, standards, and schemes

Certifications, standards, and schemes 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, the sustainability certifications industry encompasses a wide range of approaches, creating confusion for both travellers and accommodation providers.

For travellers, it’s not clear what each certification stands for – or how properties are assessed for their practices. For accommodation providers, pursuing certifications is an expensive and time-consuming endeavour, and it’s important for them to know those efforts will be recognised and visible to travellers deciding where to stay.

To address this challenge, we worked closely with our partners and our Independent Advisory Group to develop an initial set of criteria, set to evolve over time, that has broad industry alignment. We created a transparent process for certifications to be reviewed based on these criteria, and we publish those that pass on our website for our partners and the wider industry to use. Learn more about our Certifications criteria.

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.