The EU has launched a consultation process seeking feedback on planned new rules for assessing the environmental impact of hotel accommodation.
The Department for Mobility and Transport is working on new draft rules, known as the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), to cover the hotel sector and its sustainability efforts.
These new rules will be designed to help the hotel industry to become more sustainable across the EU’s 27 member states.
This will involve hotels having to provide “solid evidence” to substantiate their sustainability claims, as well as ensuring “credibility and trust among consumers looking for sustainable accommodation”.
Other elements of the new rules will include “facilitating fair competition” by allowing companies to compare their environmental footprints based on a “harmonised method”.
They will also give the hotel industry the opportunity to reduce their sustainability efforts and costs “by defining what matters most, effectively improve their environmental performance and tracking, and ultimately invest in a healthy environment”.
The new consultation runs from 3 February until 2 March, with the feedback then being reviewed before a finalised draft of the new rules for hotels are published in the first half of 2026. The rules will then be applied in the second half of next year.
PEF is a comprehensive life cycle assessment method for quantifying the overall environment impact of goods and services in the EU, including the carbon footprint, water usage and other environmental factors.
Once this process is completed, Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) are then created for the specified sector. Drawing up these rules for hotel sustainability will be the first time that the PEF process has been applied by the EU to the “tourism ecosystem and services”.
The move is part of the EU’s policy of trying to ensure that more standardised sustainability information is made available to consumers. This also includes the proposed EU Flight Emissions Label, which aims to provide harmonised information on the CO2 footprint of flights in the EU.