AUSTRALIA: WISE Sustainability, which offers sustainable solutions for hotels, has launched a widget giving hotels the opportunity to display live sustainability information on their websites and other digital channels.
The WISE widget, which launched today, provides continuous, verified updates on up to 15 key sustainability metrics, such as energy and water usage, waste reduction, and responsible tourism activities.
The launch of the new tool is timely as the Green Claims Directive comes into play and all sustainability claims made by hotels will need to be verified and backed up with facts.
Christopher Warren, chief scientific officer at WISE Sustainability said: “Confidence in green claims has now become a major challenge for responsible sustainable tourism. On the one hand we have scepticism from guests and staff and on the other we have challenges from companies to transparently show their progress without greenwashing or even greenhushing.
“WISE Sustainability aims to bridge this gap with the WISE widget, a world-first in real time sustainability reporting, and empowers consumers to make much more informed choices with ease.”
Unlike traditional static reports, which are often only released on an annual basis looking at monthly figures, the live widget offers data in real-time (updated every 15 minutes).
The widget measures electricity, solar, gas, water, hot water, and waste (or any combination) and allows WISE Sustainability to report on daily guest night use, alongside weekly, monthly and seasonal performance.
In addition, the company also records and showcases the number of responsible tourism activities that are recommended to guests each day.
These data sets over long time periods (seasonal and annual) are cross checked to provide evidence-based verification that provides a reasonable level of assurance. Other data sets (day and week) are monitored results, verified at the limited level of assurance.
At the moment there seems to be confusion and frustration among consumers over green claims made by the hotel industry and research by Euromonitor found that consumers are “greenwashed out”.
61 per cent of respondents said they find it difficult to find a product that is environmentally friendly, while 44 per cent said they do not trust environmental claims.
“We need consumers to be more confident to select the green choices available to them. But currently confidence is weak,” Warren said.
Although Booking.com’s recent survey found that 52 per cent of people want to know more about an accommodations’ sustainability certification, this is lower than last year where 69 per cent of people wanted to know.
Warren asks: “Is tourism facing a crisis of confidence over green claims?
The new tool collects and presents the sustainability data, saving hotel staff the time, and communicating it in “an authentic and transparent” way for guests looking for more sustainable stays.
The data collection follows ISO 14065 criteria – standard for environmental information reporting.
The cost of the new tool for hotels is £500 per annum for internal verification and £1,000 per annum for 3rd party independent verification.
Image supplied