How Green Is My Hotel

The Hague â€" seen from the outside, the Court Garden Hotel, with its 1970s utilitarian commercial exterior, doesn’t appear particularly green.

But the certification plaques in the LED-lit, ultra modern lobby tell a different story. This hotel is one of the premier eco-friendly lodgings in the Netherlands.

The hotel is Green Key certified, one of only three hotels in the country to be given the Ecolabel by the European Union and the first hotel to be given an A+ by the Dutch minister of the environment. And it is the only hotel in the Netherlands to serve 100 percent organic food, according to the owner.

“We tried to apply all the possible things we could do to make it sustainable,” said the hotel’s owner, Achou Zhang.

As interest in sustainably rises and as more and more people travel, the market for genuinely eco-friendly accommodtion is growing. But eco-friendliness is a matter of degrees and finding a night’s stay that is actually green is not always easy.

2012 marked a milestone in travel and tourism: for the first time, international arrivals topped one billion. There were 39 million more international travelers than in 2011, the United Nations World Tourism Organization announced last week. As we previously reported on Rendezvous, accommodation and activities are estimated to make up 25 percent of all the CO12 emitted by the tourism industry, or roughly 1 percent of the world’s total, according to the UNWTO.

The Court Garden Hotel opened a year and a half ago, after extensive renovations to an existing building. The redesigned building alone does much to make the hotel it houses eco-friend! ly.

The floor of the spacious basement is made from recycled PET bottles. So are all the headboards in the 70-room hotel. Furniture is made from recycled wood. The building has no air conditioning, but relies on a heat pump and triple pane windows to keep the rooms cool, or as is more often needed in southern Holland, warm.

The building is powered by green electricity. Specially designed faucets, shower heads and toilets limit water waste.

Motion detectors, daylight sensors and key card readers ensure that electricity for lights and appliances is only on when needed.

The hotel estimates that the setup reduces its electricity bill by nearly 60 percent and its gas usage by more than 52 percent. The hotel scored 49 of the 55 possible points on the Green Key certification process.

“Oh, everyone has Green Key certification,” said Ms. Zhang, adding that it is the combination of certifications, plus the citation from the environment mnster that shows her hotel is even greener then the rest.

As we’ve reported on Rendezvous, certifying sustainability is never simple. And accrediting eco-friendly accommodation is no exception. Different programs cover different regions and different features, for example, LEED certifies the design of buildings, other processes, such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (or GSTC), certify social as well as ecological sustainability. More importantly, some certifications are more rigorous than others.

The EU Ecolabel is better known for its certification of hardwood floors or TVs than for its hotel recommendations.

Besides the proper certification, these niche hotels also rely on the eco-conscious travelers to find them. Book! Different! .com, a hotel search engine that donates part of its commission to charity has started listing environmentally friendly hotels.

“We believe there is a strong green awareness among leisure and business travelers alike, and this will continue to grow,” Bastiaan Fronik, who runs the company, told the International Business Times. The site uses data from the Green Globe and the Dutch Green Key program.

The popular travel booking site, Travelocity.com, lists hotels certified by the Global Sustainably Council criteria in its green hotel directory.

The eco-friendliness of Court Garden Hotel plays a role for 75 percent of its guests according to surveys, said Ms. Zhang. 

As the category grows, Ms. Zhang says she is not worried about the competition.

“We are the first one, but it is better if there are moe coming,” she said.