How To Find Sustainable Hotels

Many hotels are catching on to the popularity of environmentally friendly practices and are including them in their sustainable hotels. These practices can range from eliminating plastic at a location to solar power. However, there is currently no set standard for making a hotel officially qualify as “green” or “environmentally friendly.” This can make it difficult for eco-friendly travelers to know where the right place to stay is.

With the help of booking websites, green certification programs, and recommended hotels, you can organize travel to sustainable hotels easily and without worry.

1. Use Booking Websites

In late 2021, Booking.com announced that they launched a Travel Sustainable Badge to create “a credible, globally relevant sustainability measure” available to properties that implement a combination of sustainable practices that meet a threshold for their destinations. This badge will make finding sustainable hotels easier for eco-friendly travel.  Expedia offers its Green Hotels program to help travelers organize travel. This program allows travelers to search for sustainable hotels on the platform that is cross-certified.

Other booking website options include sites that are specifically focused on green travel.  These websites include Ecohotels, Bookdifferent, and Select Green Hotels. Sites like Rainforest Alliance and Positive.Travel offer the listing of sustainable hotels for travelers. 

While all of these options will lead you to many green hotels, it is still the best practice to check the hotel website, where they mention their sustainable efforts to avoid greenwashing.

2. Look for Sustainable Certified Hotels

Some great certification programs award eco-friendly labels to different sustainable hotels once they meet a strict sustainability standard. You can usually find sustainable-certified hotels on the website of each sustainable-certified body. While this may sound similar to what sites like Booking and Expedia are doing, many of these programs are run by independent companies. 

Green Key, for example, is one of those sustainability certification programs and is operated by the world’s largest environmental organization, the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE). The Green Key has been awarded to over 3,000 establishments in 65 countries to help individuals organize travel.

In addition to Green Key, several other certification programs include Green Globe, Travelife, and Earth Check.  All of these programs have standards before awarding sustainable hotel recognition. 

The only downside to having so many certification bodies is that they all set different measures for sustainable hotels and eco-friendly travel. For more information on identifying certifications with a global standard, you can read our article about it here. 

3. Choose Sustainable Media Recommended Hotels

Many eco-friendly travel websites and blogs out there, ours included, focus on bringing great sustainable hotel options. The Ethical Traveler, for example, is a great website to find destinations to travel via their ethical destinations list. The Ecotravelist is another excellent option for a professional travel writer. But, again, sustainable media will help to point you in the right direction. The sustainable media platforms will often introduce sustainable awarded hotels, among others. 

When looking to organize travel, it might be easier to find a hotel if you first decide on the destination. Then, you can search for hotels within your specific location for eco-friendly travel. Another way is to pick the hotel you want first, and then you also will choose the destination at the same time. Either way, you want to make sure that you don’t leave looking for hotels as the last item on your planning list, as it will reduce the number of sustainable hotels available for eco-friendly travel.

We hope you organize your best eco-friendly travel yet with all of these tips in mind!

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