Hotel or B&B footprint

Calculation parameters

Calculating the footprint associated with hotel stays can be quite complex, given the variety of parameters in the equation, including :

• The number of nights spent in hotels per year:

  It may be difficult to estimate the number of nights spent in hotels during the year, but also to differentiate between different types of accommodation.

• Number of people in the room:

  How do you estimate the number of people in your room? This figure may vary from night to night, the simplest way to get an approximation is to amortize the footprint of hotel nights by the number of people in the household.

• Location:

  Whether between countries or even between cities, differences in impact can appear, notably because one of the most important parameters of a hotel's footprint is its electricity mix.

• Standing:

  The hotel's standing is also an important factor. A low-end hotel and a high-end hotel will not have the same footprint.

To calculate the annual footprint of your hotel "consumption", and in order to simplify the answer to this question, we have chosen to ask the user only for the number of nights he spends per year in the hotel, even though the footprint may be more or less significant, depending on the starting hypotheses.

Consistent results

Using default values representative of the French population, the footprint for this calculation is 42.24 kgCO2e.

The idea here is to compare this result with the result obtained from the SDES "macro" approach for the "Lodging" economic branch, which gives a footprint of 73.62 kgCO2e per inhabitant.

Thus, considering only the "Hotels" sector (67% of the sector's sales), we find a value of 49 kgCO2e. The order of magnitude is similar! However, this estimate takes into account business travel.

• The number of people sharing the room:

In this model, we assume that the hotel's footprint is divided by the number of occupants. This is a strong assumption, as it's easy to imagine that families/households don't always travel in their entirety! We also assume that a family of more than 4 people will take 2 rooms, and more than 8, 3 rooms, which explains the factors 2 and 3 in the formulas.