You’ve heard of XML standards and standards for Electronic Miscellaneous Documents? Now the hotel industry is attempting to forge a standard for measuring the impact of carbon emissions.
The International Tourism Partnership and the World Travel & Tourism Council, joined by major hotel brands, say they are working to establish “a consensus on a single methodology for calculating carbon footprints and consistent metrics for communicating milestones.”
The groups say that hotels currently use widely divergent carbon measurement metrics, leading to “confusion,” and transparency suffers because of the slew of methodologies and tools being deployed.
Joining the Carbon Measurement Working Group are Accor, Fairmont Hotels, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental, Marriott, MGM Resorts, Movenpick, Red Carnation Hotel Collection, Starwood, Premier Inn-Whitbread Group and Wyndham.
The working group is being assisted by Greenview Consulting and the World Resources Institute.
The group hopes to have standards in place in time for the 2012 RFP season.
With standards, hopefully when hotels brag about their carbon offset efforts, the boasting will be on a level playing field.
Let’s hope that the World Resource Institute doesn’t dumb down the standard method for calculating Hotel Co2, as they most certainly did in the airline space.