The same law that killed Booking.com's green badge reaches your hotel on September 27
The new EU rules arrive with no grace period, and they cover the green words in your Booking.com listing and your channel manager as much as the ones on your own website
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. On September 27 a new set of EU rules on environmental claims starts to apply, in every EU country, with no phase-in. The law is the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, formally Directive (EU) 2024/825. It was agreed in early 2024, countries had to put it into their own law by March, and several were late. That changes nothing for your hotel: the date holds either way. A line on your room page that is fine on the twenty-sixth can be against the law on the twenty-seventh.
What it bans. The broad words. Eco-friendly. Green. Sustainable. Environmentally friendly. You can only keep using them if you can show the performance behind them. Same for any green badge or leaf symbol that is not backed by a real certification or issued by a public body. And you can no longer call a stay carbon neutral because you bought offsets against it.
This is not a new rulebook. It sits inside the consumer-protection law your country already has, policed by the same authority that polices misleading advertising. What changes is that these claims stop being arguable. Either you show the evidence, or the claim goes.
It already happened to the biggest seller in your channel. In March 2024 Booking.com switched off its Travel Sustainable badge worldwide. More than half a million properties were wearing it. The Dutch consumer authority had told Booking.com the programme was probably misleading: the name implied travel is sustainable, the green leaves made it worse, and nobody could tell what the score measured. Booking.com replaced it with a filter for properties holding an outside certification, which is exactly what the new rules now ask of everyone. The biggest OTA in the world read this two and a half years early, under the same law.
The claims you never wrote. Your website is the easy part. Think about where else your hotel says something green. The sustainability boxes somebody ticked in your channel manager three years ago. The green practices section on your OTA listing, which you did not write and probably have not read. The sustainability filter a corporate travel booker screens properties with. Your Google profile. Every one of those is your hotel telling a guest something, and it is your claim whoever typed it.
The catch. You will see a figure quoted everywhere: fines of up to 4% of turnover. Two things about it. That is turnover in the one country where the case is brought, not your whole business. And it belongs to Europe-wide actions against large companies, not to a forty-room hotel with a careless sentence about towels. What actually reaches an independent is a letter from a competitor or a consumer group telling you to stop, a court order if you do not, and the cost of rewriting. Nobody can tell you more than that yet: enforcement is national, several countries are behind, and no authority has yet acted against a hotel under the new wording.
What it means for hotels. Three doors, and you pick one per claim. Say something specific you can prove — the solar panels went in last spring, single-use plastics went out in 2023. Hold a real certification, such as the EU Ecolabel, which is what lets a broader word stand — though check that yours qualifies, because not every badge will. Or say nothing about it at all, which stays completely legal and is the door nobody selling you a compliance package will mention first.
Then go and look. Put your own hotel name into Google and read what your Booking.com listing and your Google profile say about you. Then find whoever has the channel manager login and open the sustainability section.
Booking.com took the badge off half a million listings before the law made it. The hotels underneath are still making the claim.
Read also: The AI cares more about your eco-certificate than your guests do
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