Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Tool 2015: Energy, Water, and Carbon

Abstract

This tool—a result of the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking (CHSB) study—grows out of a series of meetings and roundtables in which lodging industry representatives expressed the need to develop operating benchmarks for energy use, water consumption, and carbon emissions. As explained here, developing such benchmarks is challenging, due to the wide variety of hotel operations worldwide.1 Now in its second year, the CHSB is undertaken annually for the following purposes: • Provide credible benchmarks according to industry-specific segmentation and metrics globally; • Provide industry data analysis, using a confidential data set maintained by an academic center that will not be shared with third parties or used commercially; and • Work toward establishing a commonly defined, transparent, and rigorous method for modeling energy and water usage based on hotel-specific attributes and data that are applicable and current.