Your hotel already has a carbon score in the corporate booking tool, and it probably isn't yours.
Concur sorts hotels by lowest emissions. Without your own figure, you're ranked on a regional average built mostly from chain data.
by Markus Busch
The sort button. Open the hotel results in Concur's booking tool and you can re-sort them by "Lowest Emissions" or "Highest Sustainability Score." The figures come from Thrust Carbon, which SAP Concur wired into the tool so that travelers can browse and sort hotels by emissions, certifications and sustainability scores. BCD Travel's consulting arm, Advito, runs its own hotel sustainability index and uses it to score suppliers inside corporate hotel RFPs.
So there is a carbon number next to your hotel on a corporate traveler's screen. The question is whose.
Where the number comes from. Thrust uses a hotel's own measurement when one exists, and otherwise a benchmark for its category and location, according to a booking site that licenses its data. Advito scores hotels that don't report on regional averages and gives extra points to hotels that hand over their data. The travel management company CTM uses UK government factors that rest on an average hotel per country, where the city, the room size, the pool and the gym change nothing.
The distribution system in the middle works the same way. Amadeus collects hotel emissions data from several sources into one hub for the agencies and booking tools that sell through it, and each seller picks the method. A hotel that hasn't measured gets the fallback whichever method is picked.
Different companies, one mechanism. If you haven't measured, you are given someone else's number.
Who built the average. The benchmarks trace back to the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking index. In its latest edition, 45 hotel companies covering 31,872 hotels submitted data. The industry's carbon method, HCMI, is used by about 30,000 hotels. There are roughly 880,000 hotels in the world. Fewer than one in twenty files its own figure.
Radisson, one of the contributors, rebuilt its Manchester city-center hotel around rooftop heat pumps and measures the result. The independent across the street, with older boilers or newer windows, is scored on an average either way.
Why this autumn. The EU's final reporting rules require companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in turnover to report their emissions from financial year 2027, with the first report due in 2028. Business travel is a standard category in that count. For the first three years, those companies may use estimates where they can't get the information from their suppliers.
The benchmark next to your hotel is exactly that kind of estimate. And the RFPs answered this season set the hotel programs those 2027 reports will count.
What it means for hotels. The method is free. The HCMI tool turns a year of utility bills into a carbon figure per occupied room night, for any hotel of any size. On Monday, download it and give it to whoever pays the energy invoices. Put the figure in the sustainability section of every corporate RFP you answer this season. Then ask the travel management companies behind your largest accounts whether their hotel index accepts data from hotels. Advito's does.
Read also: BCD is steering corporate bookings away from hotels that fumble virtual cards · The hotel side of the corporate RFP just started automating too
Enjoying this analysis?* Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →